At some point in the future, artificial intelligence may create art, music, and lyrics that rival human-made works. For now, the most impressive feature of most generative AIs is their ability to perform many mediocre jobs very quickly. This skill is changing many industries: in the world of higher education, where I work, we find that it is very complex to distinguish between AI-generated mediocrity and something that indicates a student is learning to do good work. But no industry has been more transformed by AI than the murky world of search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is the murky art of increasing a company’s visibility in search results for a specific 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 site the client wants to promote. This search engine spam is a pervasive invasive species on the newfangled web, and generative AI is adept at creating it quickly. In fact, search engine spam is so common that Google, Bing, and other search engines now offer AI-powered assistants that promise to answer questions in a human manner, rather than directing frustrated users to deceitful search engine spam. And thus as Internet researchers Documentary by Judith Donath and Bruce Schneierwe’re starting to see LLMO (Immense Language Model Optimization) aim to get recent 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, genuine human voices are becoming a scarce and desirable commodity. Over the years, insiders have added “the site:reddit.com” to searches in hopes of getting real human opinion, but SEO has now appeared on Reddit Bots powered by artificial intelligence that promise to mention your product in comments in a “human, genuine” way.
To find real human voices, in 2025 we will increasingly visit the oldest corners of the web, where human moderation keeps machines at bay. To consider MetaFilterfounded in 1999; This is where 12,000 paid members, assisted by a petite team of moderators, showcase the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer each other’s questions on AskMeFi. Or Arenaan ad-free social network where users create collections of video clips, photos and web links to document their interests and explore rabbit holes.
In 2025, we will also create our own spaces for people, using the latest social media tools available. Our research shows that alongside the influencers and micro-celebrities who dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds, there are millions of video creators who NO I want to go viral. Instead, they make short videos for family and friends, subvert recommendation algorithms, and use social media not for celebrity but to maintain social connections.
Regardless of whether artificial intelligence dominates the future of our entertainment and knowledge, it is protected to assume that people will still want to connect with each other. In 2025, when artificial voices will increasingly drown out human voices, tools that support find genuine voices may be as valuable as those that convincingly imitate humans.