There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this: But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]
Tag: bot
What do the authors of misinformation have to gain?
Medium, which has been great at removing misinformation about me, rightly asked (after removing yet another fake story about me), ‘Why are they using your name? What are they gaining?’ I replied: Thank you, and I’m glad you’ve asked. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this for a while, ever since these […]
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SEO scams, and two outfits to avoid
Recent events have reiterated how a lot of the SEO profession—I’d say almost all of it, except for a tiny sliver of people who really know what they are doing—is a crock. The good news is you can confirm which ones are the crooks by seeing who had posted lies about me. Usually they write […]
Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?
It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]
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Why web pages are becoming homogenized
Dan York in Vermont referred to Mia Sato’s article in The Verge today, on how Google has driven the bland, same-again websites out there. It does lay the blame at netizens more, and fairly so here, given that the desperation behind SEO has led many to employ certain tricks in order to make a buck […]
Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no
This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it. It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]
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ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]
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Marking galleries private today
Along came Copytrack again yesterday, identifying an image that they allege we stole and put on Lucire’s website. And once again I had to go back through old emails—only 11 years this time, not 13 like the last—to retrieve the email to prove that I had the correct licence to publish it, and that and […]
Life in the capital
Amazing what sort of press releases come in. I had no idea that Auckland is our capital, and I was surprised to find that Toronto and Antwerp are as well in the same release. Essential Living is a British firm, from the looks of it, and no, we won’t be publishing this in Lucire. […]
It feels like half of Facebook is bot
Here’s a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groups—actually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts don’t make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But I’m not going to let them inflate, […]