There’s something very deep in our response to righteous anger. Spicy autocomplete. Righteous anger, followed by italic uncertainty. Dehumanizing the AI so that we’re ready for eradication. At the same time, AI is already replacing human content creators – journalists, bloggers, illustrators, troll farms, SEO experts, photographers, data labelers, etc.
Generative AI is not necessarily terrible. ChatGPT can be forced to link to the source of each of its statements and will become like a search engine. Websites can flag human-created content with a badge of honor. The chatbots could be used where human support was previously impossible, increasing the need for more specialized human support and sales.
The society managed to navigate harmful technological advances in the past. Open Source happened. I don’t quite see how we’ll push back against some of the negative uses of AI like deepfakes but we’ll have to figure it out.
Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.
In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).
I’m interested in using AI to optimize things and got the nudge to read this book because of my interests. I find this book quite depressing.
A team of engineers in the Google-sized company Avogadro Corp implements a software called ELOPe. It optimizes emails based on the desired outcome. ELOPe has access to everyone’s main communication channel, which gives it instant and infinite power. It quickly takes over the company by sending bogus emails. The software is good enough to self-improve, manipulate, and survive.
Although very unrealistic from an engineering point of view, the book is a good warning of what could happen one day if AI is trusted. I find Skynet or the Matrix more likely scenarios than this but it should be kept in mind that although it may not play out this way, we can achieve the result in some other way.
4/5 – it’s a good warning, and a great idea, but unpleasant to read due to its unrealistic characters. I’m not sure if I’ll dare to touch the follow-ups.
The Guardian has a nice article on the curious case of Amazon’s AI-powered shops. Customers would go to the Amazon shops, pick whatever they wanted, and leave, and Amazon would charge them using AI. According to the article, the AI was in the form of human data labelers in India.
The whole thing is funny and a bit sad. Primarily funny.
Imagine the first truly self-driving car that turns out to be driven not by AI but by humans through an API. You get this gigantic self-driving center with state-of-the-art gamer sets where young folks will ride your luxury self-driving car for you. Tesla couldn’t solve this problem for 10 years using the brightest engineers. Here we are, solved for you, Tesla, using some Amazon Mechanical Turk magic. Then this driving center can be optimized, for the moments when the drivers have no cars to ride, they’d vacuum with robots or mow grass with the 100% AI lawn mowers.
Google knows about my site but sends no traffic, based on ~2 days of data. Google’s knowledge of my site is limited to a very small number of indexed pages. Most posts aren’t there.
Why is that and should I care about it?
Google ranks sites based on an ever-changing algorithm. When Google started, the top factor for ranking was inbound links – if other sites link to you. This, however, has been abused by SEO experts from day one. People would buy countless assets, use them for linking and rank themselves high with some garbage content. So, Google pushed back by adding more and more factors and so far, the battle is ongoing. They are losing it in areas with a high commercial interest but no brands. Finding a human plumber in Bulgaria with Google is no go.
Blogs are by nature not great at coming up with unique searchable titles. When I blog about how pretty my cup of coffee was, should I realistically expect to be ranked? Probably not.
Blogs that are great with titles and topics that Google wants to see are generally unreadable by humans. I see the content written for bots all the time – 3-4 pages long so that it is considered quality content by the AI overlords. It would have multiple headers in the middle, each with a list from 1 to 10 or so. When I see that, I wish I had a block button to never see it again.
Google would send me 100s of hits per day to my former blog but all of these were to 10-year-old posts I didn’t care about. I value one comment on my latest post more than a 1000 of these Google clicks. So the answer is no – for a personal blog, Google doesn’t matter. Optimizing for their ever-changing algorithm would make my site worse.
I care about Google, what do I do
Google’s strategy is to make you pay for traffic, this is what made them so big. They farm people’s desire to be found, to sell products, and to grow. So, what else?
Bring blogrolls back – exchange links or quotations with people. Google doesn’t mention links as SERP factors anymore but they’re likely still using them
Write frequently – you never know which cringe post will be ranked and will boost your site by 100-200 views per day
Buy a domain early and register it for a long time
Get some social media shares, even if it’s just you sharing your own content. It likely counts.
I would keep acting like Google doesn’t exist for the context of this blog. It would be flattering to have more traffic but I still value human interactions (likes & comments) more than random traffic to old posts. These I get primarily from the Reader, Facebook, and Twitter.
Veselin.blog 