Nice to get some link love from Mashable, though unfortunately Wordpress didn’t pick it up. I only knew because 13 spun splogs, including “AI”-translated ones, picked it up and linked us, and my blog had a queue of track-back requests.
Chris Taylor’s ‘Welcome to Google AI Mode! Everything is fine’, with the sub-lede ‘Wait a minute … is this the Bad Place?’, is a great read, and he highlights my blog post discussing how Google had intentionally asked the search team to make their product worse. (This had come out in discovery with the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit, which they subsequently won last month.)
A great highlight from Chris:
Google search results have “kind of become the laughingstock of the Internet,” [Amsive VP of SEO strategy Lily] Ray says. “Whenever Google communicates about AI Overviews, they say ‘our users really love it.’ But then when you read Google Forum, it’s always like ‘how do I turn this thing off, I want Google search back.’” (Even turning AI search off, according to one Google Forum user, doesn’t turn it off.)
As Chris says: when you have 90 per cent of the search market, and are effectively a monopoly, then you can make things worse.
I admit I played with the OpenAI image generation (via ChatGPT) a few times this week while under the weather. Sorry, I won’t be consuming the earth’s resources at such breakneck speeds again. Using me—since I believe we each have agency over ourselves—I asked it to generate a photo using publicly available sources. The resulting person looked nothing like me, but I imagine he had a bit of Toronto Jack in him as well. I suppose if I was famous, there’d be more source imagery and the result would be better.
Uploading a photo didn’t really improve things. At best, the result looked like a reasonably photorealistic caricature. It was completely in line with the imagery that went along with the disinformation articles that I had to deal with through 2024. Those images were likely based on me and my namesake’s mugs.
That was enough. It might be useful for conceptualizing but I would be extremely mindful of the environmental impact.
That’s two contacts with “AI” this week, neither of them positive. A dozen splog posts versus one genuine article. How is the real thing going to be noticed amongst all the drivel? I’m doing my bit, I’m linking it here—but then so have some of the splogs.
It is a miracle that Chris found my blog because it doesn’t always come up for search terms in Google for things I know I have covered (and, in some cases, put in the headline). Bing is equally patchy. Mojeek has the excuse of being an independent with a smaller index, but it’s fairly good when it comes to this blog. Traffic is down, though Chris’s article will have helped boost things.
Once upon a time big media cited this blog regularly, when the blogosphere was taking off and you could find things. Der Spiegel and Guardian Unlimited gave me some link love within 12 days of my starting this blog back in 2006, and I wound up on Aljazeera English’s The Listening Post several times as a result. Today, blogs are lost in the noise, and, thanks to “AI”, the noise is getting worse. Therefore, I’m very glad a human found this blog and determined that it was written by another human, and that he found it worthy of linking in a highly read article.
I have not been able to access Curlie for some time. I wonder if it has gone offline. If so, it will be a sad end to something that has been with us since the turn of the century. Just when search engines were faltering badly and “AI” comes up with utter nonsense, Curlie could have helped and shown us new sites to discover, boosting diversity as well. Looks like we’re hanging on to our link pages.
The title of this post is, of course, a reference to Cheers, brought back into the general consciousness with the passing of actor George Wendt (‘Norm’) earlier this week.
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