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mostlysignssomeportents · 28 days

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Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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younes-ben-amara · 3 months

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مثال واقعيٌّ على نمط الصحافة وصناعة المحتوى التي لن يقضي عليها الذكاء الاصطناعيّ🤖

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 🎣🌐 الأعداد السابقة من “صيد الشابكة” 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #1 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #2 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #3 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #4 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #5 🤩 📚 مبادرة من محلّ الكتب بيريلاندرا (Perelandra) في فورت…

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#Adweek #Digital Content Next #Fort Collins bookstore #HouseFresh #Jason Kint #Lord Byron #Perelandra #Sentiers #The Colorado Sun #موقع HouseFresh #محل Perelandra #نشرة Sentiers #الذكاء الاصطناعي والكتابة

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obeyfeline · 3 months

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Why independent and informed voices are being throttled in favor of conglomerate sludge.

#housefresh #seo

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eurosmart · 7 months

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Australia có nhiều thành phố không khí trong lành nhất thế giới

Theo Bảng xếp hạng toàn cầu được HouseFresh thực hiện, Australia có 6 thành phố không khí trong lành nhất thế giới gồm Perth, Wollongong, Sydney, Newcastle, Adelaide, thủ đô Canberra và Melbourne. Phóng viên TTXVN tại Sydney dẫn báo cáo của tổ chức HouseFresh cho thấy trong số 9 thành phố có 365 ngày không khí trong lành nhất thế giới năm 2023 thì có đến 6 thành phố ở Australia, trong đó Perth…

View On WordPress

#Australia #chất lượng không khí #cổ #giới #HouseFresh #khí #không #không khí trong lành #lạnh #nhất #Nhiều #phố #thành #thành phố sạch #thành phố trong lành #thế #trong

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beesmygod · 24 days

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housefresh, one of the few independent review sites, has published some really alarming stuff: they and other independent sites are being de-prioritized by google for, predictably, the websites running the most profitable google ads. SEO analyst lily ray backed this up with a huge list of websites getting hammered by this.

now, more than ever, you need to learn the 2 steps it takes to use an RSS reader

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mapsontheweb · 3 months

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The states with the highest percentage of home listings with a major fire risk

(source: housefresh)

#maps #submission #fire #risks #us

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quohotos · 2 months

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I'm begging you to read this article. Google has lost the mandate of heaven

#Google #Tech #enshittification #Journalism

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styledeficit · 3 months

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Saved to read later

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erice549 · 25 days

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yet another prime example of the damage SEO has done to the internet.

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accidental-memory · 1 month

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This article is a well-researched deep dive into how SEO garbage has destroyed product reviews, even those under otherwise respectable names, using up to and including outright fraud releasing nothing but scraped Amazon listings and industry copy instead of actually ever trying the product.

#seo #google #fraud #consumer fraud #product reviews

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

#pluralistic #monopoly #seo #dark seo #google #search #enshittification #platform decay #product reviews #spam #antitrust #trustbusting

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msclaritea · 3 months

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Opinion: AI companies like OpenAI are driven by anti-humanism

"Let’s come to an understanding of how we got to this moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. Similar to the way scientists controversially study and tinker with viruses — under the assumption that they’ll naturally mutate anyway, so we should try and prepare for them ahead of time — a few unaccountable masters of the universe not that long ago decided that the world was probably headed in this AI-focused direction anyway, so why not hurry the process along?

That, basically, is the thinking that let the genie out of the bottle and gave us companies like OpenAI, which is now worth $86 billion and is led by a boy king with vocal fry who believes there is such a thing as a “median human” and who has yet to be candid with the world about why OpenAI fired and then rehired him. For better or worse, his company is now at the vanguard of a race to develop products that are as good or superior to humans at a growing number of tasks.

Thus, the race began. Organizations from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, scared to be left behind in the scramble that OpenAI started, developed a case of AI Tourette’s and started talking up their own AI strategies. This is why search giants like Google and Microsoft are racing to give control of the internet to AI chatbots that are essentially automated plagiarists at scale, eating and then regurgitating other people’s content — while telling those of us who produce that content to do so “with people in mind,” and not the machine that’s going to either steal that content or make it so that no one can find it.

To that last point, HouseFresh (a reviews site focused on air quality products) recently went viral with an article about how Google’s actions are killing small, independent publishers. As a measure of the extent to which Google is now garbage, that article — titled “How Google is killing independent sites like ours” — had previously been outranked by sites like Reddit and by other publishers writing about the HouseFresh article. Now, though, after a massive Google update that’s still in the process of rolling out, that HouseFresh article doesn’t even rank on Page 1 of Google Search, which is populated by other sites writing or talking about that article.

If you think the search giant that built the system behind that ranking methodology is going to somehow add an AI chatbot to its search experience that makes that whole situation better, I have a bridge to sell you. Even the venerable BBC is not immune to all this, with the Beeb now saying it will use AI to craft marketing and promotional communications for its long-running sci-fi show Doctor Who (to the consternation of fans, who rightfully recoil at such a practice for a show wherein AI is always, and rightfully, portrayed as an evil to defeat).

AI is going to improve so many things, they tell us, not unlike the way technologists once propagated the absurd notion that giving everyone in the world a microphone, via Twitter, was a de facto good — notwithstanding the fact that there are a lot of crazy, evil, and mendacious people in the world. This time, though, what’s happening is not something that can be scoffed at, the way contrarians used to dismiss Twitter as little more than a vehicle for telling the world you ate a sandwich.

In fact, there’s a profoundly disgusting anti-human sentiment nestled at the heart of the AI fetishization happening all around us. It’s a push that, quite literally, amounts to a natural extension of late-stage capitalism and is largely (but not completely) about replacing people.

Think about all those realistic-looking videos that have gone viral from OpenAI’s Sora. They certainly look impressive and incredibly realistic … but it’s not like we haven’t encountered computer-generated imagery before. The difference between a Pixar movie and these OpenAI videos, obviously, is not in their quality — rather, if you find yourself blown away by the latter, all you’re really letting yourself be amazed by is the speed with which those videos were created, and how little effort it required.

Which is another way of saying it impressed you to not need humans anymore.

In many respects, it sort of feels like Silicon Valley broke the world and now is just saying to hell with it, machines can build a better one anyway. Here’s another example of what I mean about the AI push feeling deeply anti-human: Altman is reported to have said that the AI industry needs to raise a few trillion dollars to make the necessary investment into chips that will allow the industry to go to the next level. And if the past 24 months have taught us anything, it’s that what Altman wants, he gets.

One can only imagine the far-reaching and compounding good that would result from using those trillions of dollars, instead, to fix the country’s crumbling infrastructure, schools, and health care system. The money is obviously there. But the privileged few who already live lives walled-off from the rest of us have decided that money would be better spent on things like AI image generators that get testy when you ask them to draw a picture of a white person and programs that can arrange a spreadsheet better and faster than you can.

I can’t say I blame the crowd at SXSW on Tuesday who loudly booed when OpenAI VP of consumer product (and ChatGPT head) Peter Deng made the following statement: “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

#Sam Altman #Artificial Intelligence #Does Anybody Really Believe The Black Sabta Stunt Was Anything But Another Psyops From Silicon Valley and Leftists?#They're busy simultaneously trying to ge. rid of hans while still playing the race card

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