Why we removed all LLM-generated content from cortex.gg

Wed, Aug 7, 2024 2-minute read

Yes. OK. I admit it.

When ChatGPT burst in to the scene 18 months ago I was amazed as anyone else. The speed at which it could produce words! And words that vaguely seemed to make some sort of believable sense! Incredible.

We all got excited by the prospect; washed adrift in the hype and excitement of it all. It’s no wonder the seismic shift it created in the public consciousness.

Within a short while of ChatGPT being generally available, all channels - social, blog, online, offline and further were awash with LLM-generated content.

And we were no different. With just a few prompts I could generate 10 new blog posts that did summarily include lots of words that were generally relevant to the genre we were trying to depict. The Cortex blog got littered with AI generated content.

And then reality hit.

Using an LLM as an end user to ask questions of a technology tended to make sense. If I wanted to know about a subject, I could go and ask and it would do a reasonable job of answering the question (with sufficient prompts.) As a replacement search engine, LLMs have a viable place.

But as a source of first-hand authoritative pieces of content, it doesn’t stand up. For all the ‘generative’ in GenAI, the thing it is not actually generating is original thought. Publishing the output from an LLM-prompt is really not adding true value.

So we’ve pulled all that content from our website.

Nvertheless, we still need to feed the search engines and algorithms and so for our marketing sites there is still something to be said for rapidly generating search-optimised content. We can use an LLM to get us quickly to the outline of a post and then refine over the top.

(Although - watch this space. This feels like it has a limited shelf-life as inevitably search engines will detect and penalise AI-generated content.)

But for anything that purports to be authored by a human with some sort opinion - and so of some novel value - then this will always need to be written, edited, reviewed, re-written and approved by a human.

Posts in this Series