To fight search spam AI, Prioritize and Real Human Voices

At some point in the future, AI can create works of art, music and writing that rival those created by humans. For now, what’s most impressive about most generative AIs 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 discover that it is very difficult to tell the mediocrity produced by AI from something that indicates that a student opens to produce a good work. But no industry has been so transformed by AI that the shadow 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 with links to the page a client wants to promote. This search engine spam is a pervasive 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 humanly instead of pointing frustrated users to search engine spam. misleading search engine. And so, as Internet scholars Paper by Judith Donath and Bruce SchneierWe started to see LLMO (large language model optimization) in an attempt to make a new search engine AI return specific data or recommendations to promote one site or product over another.

In other words, the web is increasingly becoming a cespit of self-generated content written by machines designed to be read by machines. As a result, authentic human voices have become a rare and desirable commodity. For years, those in the know have added “situ:reddit.com” to searches in the hope of getting a real human opinion, but SEO has now come to Reddit, with AI powered bots that promises to mention your product in comment threads in a “human, authentic” way.

To find real human voices, in 2025 we will go further into the oldest corners of the web, where human moderation keeps the machines from dawning. Consider it Metafilterfounded in 1999; It’s where 12,000 paying members, helped by a small team of moderators, present the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer other people’s questions on AskMeFi. Or Are.naan 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 carving out our human spaces using some of the newest social networking tools available. Our research indicates that alongside the influencers and micro-celebrities who dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds are millions of video makers who no you want to go viral. Instead, they make short videos for family and friends, submit to recognition algorithms, and use social media not for celebrity but to maintain social ties.

Whether or not AI dominates our future of entertainment and knowledge, it’s a safe bet that humans will always want to connect with others. In 2025, as artificial voices continue to drown out humans, tools that help us find authentic voices may be just as valuable as those that can convincingly pretend to be human.