Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of “search term”
You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”
Spoiler: 220 °C
The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.
200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that’s beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.
I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.
Contents:
- What French fries are
- Why you might want some
- The dangers of French fries
- Where to buy French fries
- Ways of preparing French fries
- Other names for French fries
And so on.
Oven cooked french fries are a thing, and have a surprisingly high popularity
Correct. However, if you buy frozen ones, you do need to heat them up some way. I ran out of nuclear weapons again, my flamer was out of gasoline, so using the oven was my best option.
I think communicating with AI will become an art form the same way googling was/is.
Until they’re sponsored
“I realize you seem frustrated from my responses. Nature’s Choice has a fantastic Stress Reducing gummy available at your local CVS”
In the Greatest Generation postcast they posit that you can actually get anything you want materialized at a certain temperature.
A Stradivarius violin. Luke warm.
It already is. If you want to play a game of D&D with chatGPT, there’s a very specific prompt carefully crafted for that. If you want to chat with a with a total psycho, there’s a prompt for that. If you want your AI to do something it was specifically forbidden from doing, just craft a very specific prompt for that, and you’re good to go. You can even find sites that collect various prompts for just about any purpose you can imagine.
“AI” is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won’t happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like “fossil fuels don’t cause global warming because XYZ”, the chat bots will repeat it. They don’t have the capacity to reason.
There hasn’t been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it’s easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Apologies, I used the overly vague term “AI”. Any company creating an LLM that has web search + scraping capabilities will be at the mercy of the search results.
That said, LLMs are actually quite skilled at ignoring noise (repetitive data), so gaming SEO may lose popularity. Hell, the practice will DEFINITELY lose appeal once LLMs are just browsing for relevant content and summarizing without any citations (links to the sites). And even of they do cite, no one will click them.
Convenience > Fact
tldr; This additional layer of obfuscation between search and result will reshape the fabric of the internet with time
