To Fight AI Search Spam, Prioritize Real Human Voices

At some point in the future, AIs Art, music, and writing can produce works that rival human creations. For now, the most impressive thing about most generative AIs is their ability to generate a lot of mediocre work very quickly. This capability is transforming many industries: In the world of higher education, where I work, we’re discovering that it’s very hard to tell AI-generated mediocrity from something that indicates a student is learning to produce good work. But no industry has been more transformed by AI than the shadowy world of search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the dark art of making a business more prominent in searches for a specific keyword. Because search engines rely on links, a popular form of search engine optimization involves creating thousands of pages of realistic text with links to the pages a client wants to promote. This search engine spam is a rampant invasive species on the modern web, and generative AI does a great job of generating 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 in a humane fashion rather than pointing frustrated users to fraudulent search engine spam. And thus, as an Internet scholar Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier documentWe’re starting to see LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) in an attempt to return specific data or recommendations to new search engine AIs to promote one site or product over another.

In other words, the web is increasingly becoming a cesspit of machine-written, auto-generated content designed to be read by machines. As a result, the authentic human voice is becoming a rare and desirable commodity. Over the years, those who know the “Site:reddit.comTo search in hopes of getting a real human opinion, but SEO has now come to Reddit, with AI-powered bots That promises to mention your product in the comment thread in a “human, authentic” way.

To find a truly human voice, in 2025 we will increasingly dive into the oldest corners of the web, where human moderation keeps machines at bay. consider MetafilterEstablished in 1999; This is where 12,000 paying members, assisted by a small team of moderators, share the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer each other’s questions on AskMeFi. or the arenaAn ad-free social network where users create collections of video clips, images, and web links to document their interests and explore rabbit holes.

In 2025, we will be creating our own human space using some of the new social media tools available. Our research indicates that in addition to the influencers and micro-celebrities who dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds, there are millions of video creators who no Want to go viral. Instead, they’re creating short videos for family and friends, subverting recommendation algorithms and using social media to maintain social bonds rather than celebrities.

Whether or not AI dominates the future of our 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 overwhelm humans, tools that can help us find authentic voices may be just as valuable as those that can believably pretend to be human.