[How good is to pass fiverr test systems to get new leeds or impressions?]

Given that anyone can pass them easily by using a tablet, finding a website with all the answers, and then doing the test on a computer, they are pretty worthless. Apart from the fact that you need to "pass" some of them to sell in certain categories. 

These problems were all noted years ago when Fiverr introduced the feature, since UW had the same but I think they discontinued it. 

Either way, buyers won't care very much. 

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

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. 

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

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.

[Every Service you Need to Publish a Book]

The actual "goldmine" these days, at least on Amazon KDP, is flooding the marketplace with low-quality AI-written books with covers that look like they were made in MS Paint. The books are not books as we might think of them, but actually targeting long-tail search engine queries. The books are then offered for next to free and/or on the KDP free program.

The result? Real authors are being drowned out in listings by what are effectively spammy "SEO specialists". This is how people are using AI. Is this in the hub? I doubt it. What book authors really need - above and beyond all of the things listed here - is help with marketing, sales copy, book promo, and SEO. There's very little point spending a lot of money on your masterpiece if nobody's going to see it because it is buried under an avalanche of bad, but highly SEO-optimized, AI writing.

Amazon, like Fiverr, isn't doing very much about the low quality flooding the marketplace and frustrating its book lovers because of $. Its biggest action was to say "you can only publish 3 books a day and you have to check a box that says "this book was written by AI but that's OK, we won't tell readers because we know that our book lovers hate AI writing because of the mess it has made of KDP".

There are also AI programs out there that will write a whole book for you, create a cover, and autoformat for Kindle, so there's really no need to hire anyone. You can publish dozens of books a day in a few clicks.

So, there's some useful and practical advice on the state of the world's biggest publishing portal and how to combat it. Another fun fact: most authors never make the money back on their books. You know who is making money back on their books? People who don't pay for stuff and who invest time in learning how to SEO and market their book themselves - but these sellers are typically affiliate marketers using their book as a lead magnet to various programs and tools and hoping to monetize through clicks while enhancing their "authority" as a "thought leader". Also AI book spammers, simply because there's no real investment of anything so the ROI is superficially good.

 

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

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.

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

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.

[Value for Money is a race to the bottom]

2 hours ago, donnovan86 said:

I have many people contacting me that have website content and articles written by AI, and they have problems ranking that website or having any meaningful visits. So it's clear many thought using AI to write stuff will save them money.. and I can see why they lost a lot of buyers. I was expecting more.

That's not such a bit problem - it's normal to experiment with new technology and figure out whether it's for you or not. What isn't normal and what shouldn't be allowed is for sellers to sell AI products without disclosure. Those buyers are paying for what they think is human writing and getting AI content that they may not realize is AI until one day they noticed that Google has locked their site out of the search results.

Yes, buyers need to do due diligence, but Fiverr is pushing prices up without taking enough care to make sure that the sellers are actually offering services that are worth the price (i.e. not junk). The SS seems to be the "solution" to this, but it really isn't. Every so often, Fiverr has a PR crisis. I will not be surprised if AI is at the heart of the next one.

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

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?

[Tips for mastering communication]

Don't use ChatGPT.

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

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.

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

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?

[Value for Money is a race to the bottom]

It's pretty simple, chaps. Work with businesses and make sure they get good ROI for whatever it is that you do, whether that is tangible or intangible.

Copywriters can charge tens of thousands of dollars for one sales page if they can demonstrate that their copy leads to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, to give one example of value for money - and often, those copywriters aren't on Fiverr because their contracts will usually include revenue share, which of course Fiverr doesn't offer.

The problem is that Fiverr lost 200,000 buyers last year. We don't know why (I suspect undisclosed AI as well as generalized poor experiences with bad sellers) and is now targeting buyers who spend more, not less. That means there are less orders to go around and Fiverr is looking for sellers who can charge big bucks and satisfy their customers despite the big bucks.

This also seems to play into the success score. You're judged by how other sellers in your niche are performing as well as you. If you want an improved success score, put your prices up, deliver value on that price, and you'll be fine. It doesn't matter if you sell 100 $5 gigs with great everything if someone else is selling the same service 2 times for $500 and getting equally good scores.

tl;dr make fiverr more money with less headaches. They're not going to change course on this, and to be honest, it doesn't take much to deliver a good, openly disclosed AI service that will snip out VFM issues and also put you on a fast track to TRS and bigger paydays. Does the way that Fiverr has gone about everything suck? Yes, absolutely. I don't think the platform should be rewarded at all for its approach to business at the moment (it is actively breaking EU law wrt to clear pricing for Seller Plus members who will see a price increase from May at this moment). But this is still a place of opportunity.

Fiverr will not be concerned about a bunch of sellers and buyers leaving because the prices are going up. If the prices are going up enough, it doesn't matter that low quality sellers and buyers leave. The overall marketplace is elevated and makes more money. In theory.

 

[Drink of choice? ☕️]

I guess my drink is too controversial for this platform. Who knew that tea made with special water was so bad?

[When did you join Fiverr?]

I joined Fiverr in 2013, expecting to make pocket money from random online purchases.

The rest was mostly a surprise.

I win. Probably. I don't know. Do I get a prize?

[Fiverr = Clippy AI. Vote ✅ or ❌!]

Oh no, another archaic reference to a 50 (?) year old TV show!

 

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

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.

[When your job makes you a quasi-expert on "everything"]

@catwriter Because that's what the thing says...

I have also posted over on the seller plus thread with details of how Fiverr CS has noted there is a visual discrepancy re: the new pricing, but that's also pending approval.

[Who Is Planning to Cancel Seller Plus Premium Ahead of the Price Increase?]

I actually asked CS about this. My SM is on vacation, so I took advantage of my Priority Support as a TRS:

I responded with a screenshot of my billing and pointed out that there are consumer laws in the EU about pricing and that Fiverr was presently not aligned with those laws. This earned me a new response:

I have not received a further update. Fiverr is still violating EU consumer law. They have about 4.5 days to fix this, and it appears that they were completely unaware of this "discrepancy".

In other news, did any other people in the rewrites/editing subcategories get the email the future of proofreading is here? Go on, read it. Then get back to me with your opinions. I was shocked.

Disclosure: My posts are automatically hidden pending approval until May 10th, so I may be slow to respond and maybe sometimes I may seem not to respond at all. Sorry about that. Little point to the person who approves this: why does the forum always double post hidden posts? Or is that just my browser?

[When your job makes you a quasi-expert on "everything"]

Hello again!

Please be warned that my posts are hidden pending approval, so conversation will be rather stunted until May 10, 2024.

[The power of asking questions]

Indeed - but it is where the air of entitlement from some sellers is coming from, along with the mistaken belief that GPT is fine to use everywhere and that it is people who are criticising it who are the meanies who need to be more "kind". 

These type of stories usually don't end well for anyone. Or, as my mother liked to say a lot when I was young, "cruel to be kind" with the unspoken cruelty of kindness when unwarranted. 

[The power of asking questions]

1 minute ago, smashradio said:

I really don’t think we’re helping the poor, weak, and underprivileged by giving them a crutch and telling them, "Here you go, use this, and you never have to think for yourself again."

Can someone send this memo to Fiverr? 

[When your job makes you a quasi-expert on "everything"]

Really? I thought it was banned longer ago, but I am British... (1999, according to Google). 

But yeah, agreed about the future poison stuff - the skin is the largest organ in the body, and while it's waterproof (or resistant, if you prefer), it isn't everything-proof. The big deal at the moment seems to be microplastics though. Apparently there was a study not too long ago where researchers took blood samples (or something like that) out of a whole bunch of people including pregnant women with unborn babies. Anyway, upshot of it was everyone had microplastics, including the babies, who were getting their plastic via the placenta. 

AFAIK nobody knows just how bad this really is, other than it's probably bad. 

[When your job makes you a quasi-expert on "everything"]

But you've learned a fun makeup fact to share with the world! 

Other fun makeup facts include early makeup killing women because of stuff like mercury in the ingredients. Then there's the Chinese tiny feet shoes. Makeup! Once you get past the boring industry full of gorgeous but boring people, there's a world pain, horror, and death lying in wait.

IIRC, Queen Elizabeth I died because of her makeup. Ah yes, here you go. I could have asked ChatGPT, but sometimes you just want a museum's snappy take on things: 
 

[The power of asking questions]

Why should I be more gentle and understanding? People are using AI to defraud buyers on this platform and Fiverr is allowing it. Are you OK with that? Because it seems to me you haven't read any of my posts, just done a quick glance to see the keyword AI and gone "aha!" just as I scan most posts from people to check for GPT before I decide to engage. 

You are currently posting ChatGPT content on the forum complaining about the fact that Fiverr caught you with two accounts and that it should change its policies to suit people like you. Essentially. Let's be honest here. 

I speak more than one language too - I live abroad. What's the privilege? I see a lot of hard work and learning. No, the real privilege is having a tool that you (general you) can use to communicate without having to learn all of the words, concepts, and ideas of the other language and thinking you can just make money using the tool. Why read the rules? You speak English now. You have ChatGPT, and now you can have a machine speak for you. 

Your argument is not good. My problem, as I told a Fiverr staff member who told me I was being "negative" about AI yesterday, is that people are abusing it. AI is just a tool. As my rents have always pointed out. 

[When your job makes you a quasi-expert on "everything"]

My favorite makeup fact, about why women wear lipstick, is unprintable for this forum. But let's just say that it makes one body part look like another body part that red-blooded men like a lot. Unless they bat for the home team, so to speak.