To fight spam in AI research, prioritize real human voices

At some point in the future, artificial intelligence He may create works of art, music, and writing that rival those created by man. Right now, the most impressive thing about most productivity AI systems 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 discovering that it is very difficult to distinguish between mediocrity produced by AI and something that indicates that a student is learning to produce good work. But no industry has been more transformed by AI than the murky world of SEO.

Search engine optimization is the dark art of making a business more prominent in searches for a particular keyword. Since search engines rely on links, one common form of SEO involves creating thousands of pages of realistic-looking text with links to the page the client wants to promote. This search engine spam is an invasive species on the modern web, and generative AI systems do a great job of creating it quickly. In fact, search engine spam has become so common that Google, Bing, and other search engines now offer AI-based assistants that promise to answer questions in a human-like way rather than directing frustrated users to deceptive search engine spam. Hence, as cyberscientists Doc Judith Donath and Bruce Schneierwe’re starting to see LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) in an attempt to get the new search engine’s AI to display specific data or recommendations to promote one site or product over another.

In other words, the Internet is increasingly a cesspool of automatically 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, insiders have added to the site:reddit.com” to search in the hope of getting a real human opinion, but SEO has now arrived on Reddit, with Robots powered by artificial intelligence Which promises to mention your product in comment threads in a “human and real” way.

To find real human voices, in 2025 we will increasingly flock to the oldest corners of the Internet, where human moderation keeps machines safe. It is considered Meta filterfounded in 1999; It’s where 12,000 paid members, with the help of a small team of moderators, share the best websites and stories they’ve found and answer each other’s questions on AskMeFi. or Are.naan ad-free social network where users curate collections of videos, photos, and web links to document their interests and explore rabbit holes.

In 2025, we will also create our own human spaces using some of the latest social media tools available. Our research suggests that alongside the influencers and micro-celebrities who dominate your TikTok and YouTube feeds, there are millions of video creators who… no You want to go viral. Instead, they create short videos for family and friends, subvert recommendation algorithms, and use social media not for celebrities but to maintain social connections.

Whether or not artificial intelligence dominates our entertainment and cognitive future, humans will certainly still want to communicate with each other. In 2025, as artificial sounds continue to drown out human voices, tools that help us find real voices may be as valuable as those that can convincingly pretend to be human.