Another masterclass on how not to use AI, courtesy of Fiverr

[smashradio]

How to use AI for proofreading, according to Fiverr: AI Educational Article for Sellers - Proofreading & Editing (fiverr.com)

It's obviously written with a ton of AI tools and then "enhanced" to make it pass AI detectors. Either that, or the author is just really into fancy buzzwords and too confident in himself.

He shouldn't be, when he can't even spell cliché with the correct accent. The article lacks proper spacing between paragraphs. And even ChatGPT knew that "&" is clunky. Some proofreader. Maybe he should have used AI. 🙂

 

[emmaki]

I was also shocked when I saw this and I'm glad someone else notice this. This was an article that was presumably sent to me because I have gigs in the editing subcategory.

Of all the people to send this article to, this was the worst possible group.

• No spacing between paragraphs
• Headlines not capitalized
• Bullet point list doesn't have bullets
• Pointing to tools that are not "AI" as AI (CopyScape has been around since 2004.... its primary offering is NOT AI)
• "clichè" should be either cliche or cliché. More to the point, any "foreign" words should be italicized to indicate their foreignness. If written in English, cliche is fine. Think about how Americans pronounce it ("cleesh"/"cleek") as opposed to Europeans, including the famously monoglot British people ("clee-shay"). The accent is wrong. What the author wrote is pronounced "clee-shuh", not clie-shay. It is incorrect in multiple languages. This is basic French - and English - and une grave erreur was made here. Yes, that's an multilingual accent joke. That's my big takeaway.
• There's more. The whole piece is a disaster from a proofreading and editing perspective. It needs serious work.

Surely a piece that talks about AI as the future of proofreading should be written well and not littered with such obvious errors, all of which the tools that the author suggest would have picked up on? A piece that talks about checking for errors and fact checking would... not make these mistakes?

It seems to me that that this content was generated by AI and then parts were altered to make AI detectors think it was written by a human. ChatGPT doesn't use &, but Google Gemini does. ChatGPT loves the word plethora. But no generative AI software would spell cliche wrong - it would produce very generic, surface level content, written with better spelling and grammar. Based on these observations, I believe this was written by AI and then various aspects were deliberately made worse to pass the majority of AI detectors (it succeeds at this) - at the cost of what could have been a good and informative article.

The conclusion is fantastical if this is what Fiverr's AI editors are putting out. Any editor that cares about their output would not have published this in its present form, whether written by AI or by human. I am genuinely shocked that Fiverr not only published this, but felt it was appropriate to send this out to an audience of the people most likely to see all these errors and most likely to reject the entire premise of the article. This article has failed in every respect - it doesn't even work for marketing. 

I haven't looked at anything else in the AI Hub. If this is the level of quality that the program has to offer, Fiverr needs to reconsider its approach. This is not how you enhance work with AI and it is the antithesis of complex AI services. I'm shocked and appalled that this was published and marketed. This is exactly why I keep telling Fiverr at every opportunity that it needs to rethink its AI future.

In slightly related news, on May 1, Medium is going to forbid all AI-generated content from its partner program. Medium, like Fiverr, tried for a whole year to do the whole AI thing, mostly trusting users to disclose their use of AI. It failed. Badly. Fiverr should be watching what platforms like Medium are doing about bad AI writing and reconsidering what they are doing. This platform has good writers who use and understand AI and have responsible and  transparent policies about it.

Why not use them to write your AI hub articles? I just don't get it.

[smashradio]

On 4/26/2024 at 7:40 AM, emmaki said:

If this is the level of quality that the program has to offer, Fiverr needs to reconsider its approach.
 

The irony is almost too much. If this is the AI Fiverr is pushing,  all the old school proofreaders can rest easy knowing their jobs aren’t going anywhere (except away from Fiverr, because no one will take the platform or its sellers seriously for much longer if this is their idea of quality). 

Edited April 26 by smashradio

[emmaki]

The sad thing is that Fiverr is trying to push complex AI services ( = AI work made better by humans) and the imagination of most people - not just sellers - starts and ends with "I'll just get ChatGPT to spurt out some generic content and cover up my tracks. Job done!"

I won't go into the fundamental deception and how that destroys consumer trust in the platform here, but instead focus on another angle. Complex AI services is something that Fiverr doesn't have enough of and the business trends index - despite being another woeful piece of GPT-written content - does have some  great stuff in there in terms of gig ideas and research.

What disappoints me is that even Fiverr is being lazy when it comes to pushing what it believes is a good AI product. I have no idea how that AI webinar went (can someone fill me in?) but at the very least, there are significant opportunities for sellers who can learn to create AI automation funnels and all kinds of other  stuff for business - ChatGPT can easily be used in these to take care of the messages that nobody really reads (welcome to X and thank you for signing up!) as well as pulling leads from social media.

Yet the majority of users seeking an easy gig - whether that's deceptively selling AI content as human written or just an easy gig - are... not jumping on this opportunity. This is literally complex AI services. Automation isn't that easy (no code is a lie if you really want to finesse your automations), but that's where the money is. 

People just want something for nothing. Fiverr is trying to encourage sellers do leverage AI so prices can go up and they can take care of this in-demand stuff, but they're targeting proofreaders with badly-written content that... just turns it into a bad joke. And using AI in such a way that violates some of the main principles behind the upcoming EU AI act (e.g. AI tools used to determine performance etc. must be transparent and well-explained. The success score is neither).

It's just maddening to see how badly Fiverr is handling all of this - and how I get accused of not being technically savvy and "negative" about AI when it is quite the opposite. I see the potential. And seeing it squandered like this on a platform telling the world how it's a blah blah blah is... WHY? It's not. Fiverr is encouraging the worst use of AI. I don't know how they can't see that. Never mind the current profit of these deceptive gigs - what about the future lost cost in buyers who leave because they can't find an honest seller?

Or an honest platform?

EDIT: Also, look at this: https://www.fiverr.com/cp/ai-education-book-and-ebook-writing Notice something?

Edited April 26 by emmaki

[smashradio]

20 minutes ago, emmaki said:

EDIT: Also, look at this: https://www.fiverr.com/cp/ai-education-book-and-ebook-writing Notice something?

I'm too lazy to read it, to be honest. I expect it's the same type of boilerplate content riddled with errors, only this time, it's about books. 

[catwriter]

5 minutes ago, smashradio said:

I expect it's the same type of boilerplate content riddled with errors, only this time, it's about books. 

Pretty much.

[emmaki]

Indeed it is! Here's my favorite claim:

That's right, use Fiverr's AI, but make sure you buy a gig from Fiverr's legal experts before you do anything!

Also "the exact boost you need when you need it". Just the sort of thing Grammarly and ProWritingAid would pick up on as "repetitive", not to mention that these tools are not, in general, about writing, but proofreading. No boost needed. Why a proofreading tool would cause plagiarism is also questionable and seems a bit "workman blaming tools" than...

Anyway, I can just rip apart every single paragraph of both of these lamentable articles. Quillbot! That's literally only used for paraphrasing, which is essentially plagiarism by another name. The legal experts won't help very much here. All of the tools mentioned are for finalizing edits and are fine for commercial use. It's... the sellers.... that are the issue. It's the deceptive use of AI that is the issue. This AI Hub is... well, it's only the second article I've seen.

I'm not impressed at all. Hire me Fiverr. Let me show you how to write content without AI that is actually informative and isn't ridden with informational, spelling, and grammatical errors. Although if your hub actually doesn't allow for proper paragraphs, forget it. I'm not putting my name on that.

[smashradio]

I'm not surprised. I wouldn’t put my name on anything Fiverr has released recently. It’s subpar at best . The irony is that a writer with over 10 years of experience, who is the editor-in-chief of a newspaper with 2.4 million readers annually, and who has clients like the biggest telecom operator in Norway under his belt, isn’t considered pro enough to rewrite articles on Fiverr. Certainly not pro enough to write a press realease. Despite being vetted by Fiverr as a copywriter and considered a great addition to their pro catalog, they still don’t think I’m capable of rewriting an article or issuing a press release under the pro banner. But they can still release trash like this and get away with it.

 

[catwriter]

3 minutes ago, smashradio said:

Despite being vetted by Fiverr as a copywriter and considered a great addition to their pro catalog, they still don’t think I’m capable of rewriting an article or issuing a press release under the pro banner.

Well, you'd charge them for that.

[smashradio]

Just now, catwriter said:

Well, you'd charge them for that.

Somehow I think that would be a dealbreaker for a company that prefers to crank out drivel generated in GPT by some budget content mill in certain countries. Nothing screams corporate responsibility and great ESG ratings like having a team of sweatshop writers to empower sellers like us. 🤩

[catwriter]

5 minutes ago, smashradio said:

Somehow I think that would be a dealbreaker for a company that prefers to crank out drivel generated in GPT by some budget content mill in certain countries.

They want you to charge your customers a lot (that increases their cut, too), not them. 😸

[emmaki]

2 hours ago, smashradio said:

drivel generated in GPT by some budget content mill

I think you mean AI expert - ideally one who has a magical big book with 100,001 prompts ready to fire off to create a plethora of top-notch writing for the fast-paced world of content marketing.

Anyway, because it's Friday night and my creaky old bones won't let me go out and annoy young people with my middle-aged everything, I had a look into the author of the second piece. I still don't know who it is, but my top candidates so far are:

• Assistant professor in a statistics dept. of a university
• A Senior VP of a bank
• Someone with an undergrad in journalism
• Someone who made it to 103 (I think this is a strong candidate considering the quality of the article) before she was taken away from us
• Someone who made it to 93 (etc.)
• and 98 (there were more, but 3 illustrates the point)
• A Residence Hall. May be a sentient lifeform

What does this tell us? Excluding residence halls and the deceased, none of the other candidates seem like a likely choice to write an article like this. But you know what I think? I think someone's fired up GPT and used one of those random name generators to pluck an almost unique name out of the ether.

It is odd that Fiverr isn't using any of its sellers to write these pieces so the bylines say written by @aiwrongter (a made up username which probably isn't taken due to the horrifying presence of a negative word in it) so that for example a passing businessman might see the article and be blown away by the sheer quality of the content and hire the writer on the spot.

Speaking of AI, I don't think a lot of the top AI professionals would bother with Fiverr. Think about it. They can pretty much automate everything inc. marketing, SMM, ads, and analysis so they target their ideal clients through a variety of means. You can then onboard clients onto all these AI tools with generous affiliate plans and make a killing on passive income (if you're smart, you already got the blueprints ready so it's literal copy-paste most of the time).

You know where you can't automate anything or use your affiliate URLs with a captive market? Not to mention pretty much the whole gig is a minefield of contact details, APIs, and other sensitive business information. Now, you go to the marketplace and look up social media automation, for example. It's wall-to-wall chatbots. That's not what social media automation is. It's a part of social media automation. Imagine paying someone once to set up a whole automation that did your social media pretty much forever - all aspects of it - and never having to deal with a social media manager again. Will it be that great? Depends on the quality of the original content (e.g. your blog or video assets) that would power the rest of the funnel. You only need one piece of content to make multiple other reasonable pieces of contents with AI today.

Where is this information in the AI Hub? I'm not looking for it, because all I'm seeing is terrible GPT articles that are as generic as they get. I could find more information on Google with the search term "AI proofreading" and clicking on an obviously GPT-written LinkedIn "article" from someone trying to get people to click on their Fiverr aff link. At least the affiliate leaves the writing alone so the spelling and grammar are on point!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Fiverr literally has no idea what it is doing with AI in this marketplace. The AI Hub and whatever is going on with that is just another very strange layer to the whole obsession. Incidentally, this job still hasn't been filled: https://www.fiverr.com/jobs/QTguMjQ3. I hope when (if) it is the person they hire realizes just how bad AI is on Fiverr and tries to fix it.

EDIT: It's also noindexed....

Now why would Fiverr noindex this content when the AI Hub is intended to be a jewel in the crown of... something? Why doesn't it want big daddy Google and other search engines listing it - but why is it considered good enough to send to writers and proofreaders?

Edited April 26 by emmaki

[catwriter]

34 minutes ago, emmaki said:

why is it considered good enough to send to writers and proofreaders?

They need to send something, I suppose...

[emmaki]

In which case they can just use vanilla GPT without amendments to hide the fact. Still terrible, but not as offensive. You know, I asked ChatGPT to game this with me - "what would you do if you got caught in [the above situation]?" kind of thing.

GPT came up with a load of rubbish bit it also had one pretty good idea, which was that these could be explained away as "interactive pieces", inviting the skilled audience to correct the many mistakes, either using their human smarts or their own AI tools. GPT then very laboriously explained to me how this would be really awesome because everyone would be super into the interactivity. When I told it that it was more likely that the audience would be "problematic", it told me that I would need to be careful with how I broached the subject to avoid the ire of people who might feel that their profession was being mocked.

There's a good article for the AI Hub. "How to Write Articles with AI That Don't Insult Your Audience At A Time When They Think AI Is Stealing Their Jobs But Your Company Isn't Listening To Them". I know, I know, the title needs work.

Of course, this would have required a comment section. Go on Fiverr, I dare you to put a comment section in your AI Hub. Odds are it will be 80% spam and 20% spluttering outrage. But that's good, because then you can calculate the increase in "engagement". Since we're starting from 0 comments, you can easily come up with a magically huge number like 120,042% like the Business Index thing. The investors will love that. Just make sure they don't see the comments.

[mandyzines]

9 hours ago, emmaki said:

My brain just wants to use a colon after "place" and an em dash after "workflow" so badly. 

[emmaki]

5 minutes ago, mandyzines said:

My brain just wants to use a colon

There were certainly colons used in the production of this article; and that's all I have to say about that as a semi-colon.

[mandyzines]

On 4/24/2024 at 2:51 PM, smashradio said:

How to use AI for proofreading, according to Fiverr: AI Educational Article for Sellers - Proofreading & Editing (fiverr.com)

It's obviously written with a ton of AI tools and then "enhanced" to make it pass AI detectors. Either that, or the author is just really into fancy buzzwords and too confident in himself.

He shouldn't be, when he can't even spell cliché with the correct accent. The article lacks proper spacing between paragraphs. And even ChatGPT knew that "&" is clunky. Some proofreader. Maybe he should have used AI.  

Something's missing here as well. 

[mandyzines]

I broke the forum. 

[uk1000]

53 minutes ago, mandyzines said:

I broke the forum. 

Probably it had to be manually checked because the quoted part had the word that starts with "spe" and ends with "ll" which certain users used to promote stuff.

But if each time that is used it gets flagged then it's harder to talk about normal spellling checking of documents etc.

Quote

I have no idea how that AI webinar went (can someone fill me in?)

I didn't see it live but it seemed okay from recording of it. It could have shown more detail on things like showing doing AI stuff. I think was mostly discussing things instead and using pre-done info screens. eg. no realtime stuff done using AI. I don't think they talked much/showed much about open source AI either (their prompts shown were for ChatGPT mostly I think).

You can watch the recording of it here:

https://help.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/24321964769169-How-to-make-AI-your-business-partner-Webinar

And it talked a bit about their search engine results (gig list) ranking using AI for ranking it for each user (buyer).

Quote

but at the very least, there are significant opportunities for sellers who can learn to create AI automation funnels and all kinds of other  stuff for business - ChatGPT can easily be used in these to take care of the messages that nobody really reads (welcome to X and thank you for signing up!) as well as pulling leads from social media

Though Fiverr's community standards page says:

Quote

Do not offer, agree to provide, or ask for any services that breach third-party rights and lead to spamming individuals, such as:

• Any sharing of personal data of individuals, ex. email addresses, phone numbers, etc.

• Premade lists containing personal data of individuals

• Scraping social media platforms to obtain information about others

So I'm not sure if that would be allowed if it was ChatGPT pulling the leads from social media (wouldn't that also be scraping?).

Edited April 26 by uk1000

[priyank_mod]

7 hours ago, uk1000 said:

Probably it had to be manually checked because the quoted part had the word that starts with "spe" and ends with "ll" which certain users used to promote stuff.

Ohhh... I wasn't aware of this. Even my post went into approval mode recently, after using the aforementioned word!! 

It got approved a couple of hours later for sure. 

[emmaki]

Let's try this again, since my last post was not approved for some reason and mysteriously disappeared into the ether.

9 hours ago, uk1000 said:

So I'm not sure if that would be allowed if it was ChatGPT pulling the leads from social media (wouldn't that also be scraping?).

Scraping is not used to pull leads from social media. If you've ever noticed that a lot of influencers on social media say things like "comment [specific word] to get XYZ", they are using AI automation to detect when someone says POPSICLES and then auto-DM them with whatever. Usually a link to a landing page to sign up for whatever. It's a bit like the "thanks" and "congrats" comments on Fiverr, only they actually serve some use since both parties get value. The 1-word commenter gets whatever the lead magnet is, the influencer gets the email address. You wouldn't necessarily need GPT for this, as the desired action would be for the victim to provide their email address to kickstart your GPT-written 10-day Popiscle-Making Course packed with affiliate offers and a final offer to join the Popsicle Fan Club where for just $27 a month you get 10 new healthy popsicle recipes. Also generated by GPT. So yeah, maybe GPT. But it's all automated and the FB "community" (worth $3500) full of popsicle experts and lovers will provide a ton of human UGC content and value, all while paying for you, the popiscle course and group creator, to influence a new group of people who are into healthy and easy Mediterranean recipes for retirees with diabetes. Same formula, same automation, same everything - just slap it into GPT. If you're successful, maybe think about hiring a VA to do all the boring bits so you can drink pina coladas in the Hawaii sun
🙂

I maintain that the AI used to detect words should be finessed to include compound term, so that people might be able to write badword mistakes but not love badword. That was another comment that disappeared into the ether.

I hope this comment passes muster. I'm prepared to write it again, you know.

[smashradio]

15 hours ago, emmaki said:

Where is this information in the AI Hub?

When you think about it, it really adds up. Fiverr isn't looking to draw in AI experts. They're trying to attract as many low-level, unskilled data analyst expart copypasters as possible. To pull that off, you need to keep things simple. So simple, in fact, that it's utterly useless for anyone with real skills, but just good enough that some guy with a moped mustache in his mom's kitchen will buy into it and set up their gig, then come to the forum and ask "how rank gig day by day".

15 hours ago, emmaki said:

Now why would Fiverr noindex this content when the AI Hub is intended to be a jewel in the crown of... something? Why doesn't it want big daddy Google and other search engines listing it - but why is it considered good enough to send to writers and proofreaders?

Even Google is starting to recognize what bad content looks like. Some SEO staffer probably saw this and said "nope". 

 

[emmaki]

53 minutes ago, smashradio said:

When you think about it, it really adds up. Fiverr isn't looking to draw in AI experts. They're trying to attract as many low-level, unskilled data analyst expart copypasters as possible. To pull that off, you need to keep things simple. So simple, in fact, that it's utterly useless for anyone with real skills, but just good enough that some guy with a moped mustache in his mom's kitchen will buy into it and set up their gig, then come to the forum and ask "how rank gig day by day".

At the end of the day, it seems like most, if not all, pages on the hub are noindexed and it's just the PR stuff that is on Google. So the intent isn't to attract buyers with them, but more to, uh, do exactly what you said? I've been looking at all the AI services this morning and TBH, trying to put my mindset in that of a buyer, I had no clue which service to buy. It's a mess of keywords and ugly thumbnails with too much text on them.

Quite literally, if you have an AI automation in mind, you are confronted with very generic offers to target multiple keywords. I'm really not surprised that the majority of offers have very low sales. But the quality of the "educational content" here isn't helping either. It does literally pander to the LCD. (math, not recreational badword).

Also, @uk1000, it appears after 4 attempts that I am simply not allowed to discuss the webinar at all. Please refer to my chat with staff (on the post from a few weeks ago) to get a feeler for my opinion but note that it has dropped even lower. 

Edited April 27 by emmaki
don't worry, I didn't share my opinions about the webinar.

[coerdelion]

@emmaki - AI webinar:

How to prompt and get useable answers
How to teach Chat GPT maths, which it will promptly forget
Use Copilot
Learn Python

There was one guy who builds AIs for medical use.  Personaly, I'd be wary of asking anyone from Fiverr to build an AI for diagnostics or operation planning, but that's me.

Also, Fiverr uses a ranking system and always has.  So pants on fire for that one ... 

[emmaki]

5 minutes ago, coerdelion said:

@emmaki - AI webinar:

How to prompt and get useable answers
How to teach Chat GPT maths, which it will promptly forget
Use Copilot
Learn Python

There was one guy who builds AIs for medical use.  Personaly, I'd be wary of asking anyone from Fiverr to build an AI for diagnostics or operation planning, but that's me.

Also, Fiverr uses a ranking system and always has.  So pants on fire for that one ...

 

Math? ChatGPT is a LLM (Large Language Model). Sure, GPT 4 (and probably 5) are better than 3.5, but that's not saying a lot and doesn't include the whole 2 + 2 = 4 debate that I believe was had elsewhere on the forum a week or so ago. If you look at a discusson on the OpenAI forum, you'll see that this is a "known weakness" of LLMs. One poster comments that "This is one of the main “problems” we see with our welcome users posting here; they do not understand the difference between a generative AI and an expert system AI."

I will keep my further thoughts on that specific statement to myself, though I believe it is very relevant to Fiverr and many of its AI users. Coding has the same issue. I know a little bit of a few codes now, and ChatGPT does not code well. It makes mistakes (I'm  talking about paid GPT now) and then when you get it to correct them makes other mistakes. There are better AI tools (and AI-assisted courses, or "expert system AI") to deal with this.

Medical AI? No thank you. That's giving a lot of people a lot of bad ideas.I'm not saying Medical AI is bad, it's one of the areas that has a lot of promise but in a medical setting with trained medical professionals and ideally working with people who have longstanding experience in the industry. It's also one of those areas of Fiverr community standards that is very gray. There's a big difference between building out a website for a chiro and, say, automating a diagnostic process for terminal diseases. If I were a medical professional, I would not be looking on Fiverr: I'd be looking for a credible, established name with a long history of working in the industry, ideally someone who knows the industry very well.

I suppose it was nice that they opted to be transparent about the ranking system for the first time in.... years? So that's a positive.

All in all, my opinion from prior to the webinar and certainly following my discussion with staff about it remains unchanged. As I said then, I am the target market for this webinar. I shall end this post with a pregnant and overly dramatic pause that you shall have to imagine.