At some point in the future, AIs may create works of art, music, and writing that rival those created by humans. At the moment, what’s most impressive about most productive AIs is their ability to produce many intermediate tasks very quickly. This ability is transforming many industries: In the world of higher education, where I work, we find it very difficult to distinguish the minimum production of AI from something that shows that the 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 stand out 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 text that look realistic with links to the page the client wants to promote. Search engine spam is a pervasive form of attack on the modern web, and generating AIs do a great job of creating it quickly. Indeed, search engine spam is so common that Google, Bing, and other search engines now offer AI assistants that promise to answer questions in a human-like manner rather than directing frustrated users to deceptive search engine spam. Therefore, as Internet experts Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier write, we are starting to see LLMO (large language model optimization) in an effort to create new search engine AIs that return specific data or recommendations to improve a site or product over another.
In other words, the web is increasingly becoming a domain of automatically generated content written by machines designed to be read by machines. As a result, authentic human voices became rare and desirable. 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 promising to mention your brand in comment threads. in a “human-like, authentic” way.
Finding the voices of real people, in 2025 we will increasingly flock to the old corners of the web, where human moderation keeps machines at bay. Consider MetaFilter, founded in 1999; it’s where 12,000 paying members, helped by a small team of moderators, post the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer each other’s questions on 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.
By 2025, we will be building our own social media using the new social media tools available. Our research shows that alongside the influencers and small celebrities who dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds there are millions of video creators. don’t do it you want to go viral. Instead, they make short videos of family and friends, ignore recommendation algorithms, and use social media not for celebrities but to maintain social relationships.
Whether or not AI rules our future of entertainment and information, it’s a safe bet that people will still want to connect with others. In 2025, as artificial voices continue to absorb human ones, tools that help us find real voices may be as valuable as those that can satisfactorily pretend to be human.
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