The tricky thing in 2024 was, obviously, disinformation. More disinformation articles went up about yours truly than anything legitimate like press releases or media interviews. In other words, there was more “AI slop” going online—something mirrored in other parts of the web. As Cybarbie on Mastodon noted: ‘The surveillance people screwed themselves really, since we have far far too much low quality data now. Signal to noise is out of control.’
A lot of time was spent defending my name and reputation, and for the most part, web hosts were pretty good. There were a few exceptions, whom I won’t name lest disinformation artists flock to them. One hosting company in India even participated in disinformation themselves, breaching their own terms and conditions.
The sad thing was that so many (over 90 per cent) did nothing when called out. Most were in the “SEO” business, which outlines how amoral and shameless many of its practitioners are. Those had to be escalated to hosting companies, and Hostinger, Hetzner, Tier.net and others were remarkable at enforcing their terms and policies. It goes to show where the moral ones are. And you’d want to use those, because when things go the other way—e.g. when a frivolous claim comes—they’re more likely to support the truth rather than cave in.
Semrush was responsible for the botched data that the disinformation merchants relied on, and it took six months between my first contact with the NYSE-listed company (which was ignored) and their public admission after I confronted them on their subreddit. We learned that their software predicts as well as reports, and in this case, it made a prediction about my name trending. While it never asked anyone to write BS, sadly hundreds of its 10 million user base did just that.
The volume being reported is probably lower now, after the admission, but articles are still going up—just not one to several per day.
During the year I’ve had people suggest to me that I get into the SEO game since there were so many articles about it, but there is a thing called ethics, and giving in to “AI” fictions robs one of humanity.
We have all seen what happens to platforms when spam gets the better of them. Vox was a good example at the close of the 2000s. Eventually it shut down. Are we witnessing the end of the original web? Probably not, but we might be witnessing the end of Google, which has willingly indexed disinformation (and pays for it), especially if noise dominates the web. There are a few routes open to us: either human curation through a few trusted websites (along the lines of Curlie or the original Yahoo, if anyone can be bothered), or making sure that anything we do exists in a medium that’s not online. The stakes of creating something tangible are that much higher. Thirdly, the search engines can get smarter about keeping “AI” slop out, but as the world pivots to Approximate Imitation, then that’s the least likely of the three.
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