At some point in the future, AIs may create works of art, music, and writing that rival those created by humans. For now, the most impressive thing about most generative AIs is their ability to produce a lot of mediocre work very quickly. This capability is transforming many industries: in the world of higher education, where I work, we are finding that it is very difficult to distinguish mediocrity produced by AI from something that indicates that a student is learning to do a good job. But no industry has been as transformed by AI as the shadowy world of search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is the dark art of making a business stand out more in searches for a particular keyword. Because search engines rely on links, a popular form of search engine optimization involves creating thousands of realistic-looking pages of text with links to the page a client wants to promote. This search engine spam is a widespread invasive species on the modern web, and generative AIs do a great job of creating it quickly. In fact, search engine spam is so common that Google, Bing, and other search engines now offer AI-based assistants that promise to answer questions humanely instead of pointing frustrated users to misleading search engine spam. the search engines. And so, as Internet scholars affirm Paper by Judith Donath and Bruce SchneierWe’re starting to see LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) in an attempt to get new search engine AIs to return specific data or recommendations to promote one site or product over another.
In other words, the web is increasingly becoming a cesspool of automatically generated content, written by machines designed to be read by machines. As a result, authentic human voices are becoming a rare and desirable commodity. For years, those in the know have added “site:reddit.com”to searches in hopes of getting real human opinion, but SEO has now arrived on Reddit, with AI-powered bots who promise to mention your product in comment threads in an “authentic and human” way.
To find real human voices, in 2025 we will increasingly turn to the oldest corners of the web, where human moderation keeps machines at bay. Consider Metafilterfounded in 1999; is where 12,000 paid members, helped by a small team of moderators, present the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer each other’s questions on AskMeFi. EITHER Sandan ad-free social network where users curate collections of video clips, images and web links to document their interests and explore rabbit holes.
In 2025, we will also create our own human spaces using some of the newest social media tools available. Our research indicates that along with the influencers and micro-celebrities that dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds, there are millions of video creators who No I want to go viral. Instead, they are making short videos for family and friends, subverting recommendation algorithms, and using social media not for celebrities but to maintain social ties.
Whether or not AI dominates our future of entertainment and knowledge, it’s a safe bet that humans will still want to connect with each other. In 2025, as artificial voices continue to drown out human ones, tools that help us find authentic voices may be as valuable as those that can convincingly pretend to be human.