At some point in the future, AIs may create works of art, music, and lyrics that rival human-made works of art. The most impressive thing about most generative AIs right now is their ability to produce a lot of mediocre work very quickly. This ability is transforming many industries: in the world of higher education, where I work, we are finding that it is very difficult to distinguish AI-produced mediocrity from something that indicates a student is learning to produce good work. 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 more prominent in searches for a particular keyword. Because search engines rely on links, a popular form of search engine optimization involves creating thousands of pages of realistic-looking text linking to the page a client wants to promote. This search engine spam is a ubiquitous invasive species on the modern Internet, and generative AIs are doing 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 in a human manner rather than alert frustrated users to deceptive search engine spam. And so, as internet scientists Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier document, we're starting to see LLMO (large language model optimization) in an effort to get new search engine AIs to return specific data or recommendations to promote one site or product another.
In other words, the Internet is increasingly becoming a cesspool of automatically generated content, written by machines designed to be read by machines. As a result, authentic human voices become a rare and desirable commodity. For years, pundits have added “site:reddit.com” to searches in the hopes of getting an actual human opinion, but SEO has now come to Reddit, with AI-powered bots that promise to mention your product in comment threads in a “human, authentic ” way.
To find real human voices, in 2025 we will increasingly turn to the oldest corners of the web, where human moderation keeps the machines at bay. Take MetaFilter, founded in 1999; here, 12,000 paying members, assisted by a small team of moderators, present the best websites and stories they've found and answer each other's questions in AskMeFi. Or Are.na, an 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 be designing our own human spaces using some of the latest social media tools available. Our research shows that in addition to the influencers and micro-celebrities dominating your TikTok and YouTube feeds, there are millions of creators who not wants to go viral. Instead, they create short videos for family and friends, subvert the recommendation algorithms and use social media not for celebrities, but to maintain social connections.
Whether or not AI dominates our entertainment and knowledge future, it's a safe bet that people will still want to connect with each other. In 2025, as artificial voices continue to drown out human voices, the tools that help us find authentic voices could be just as valuable as those that can convincingly pretend to be human.
