It’s the Year of AI, and right now everyone feels compelled to use AI at every opportunity.

I reckon I have a good eye for generated content and one thing I’ve noticed recently is that there’s a lot of content being published which is pretty clearly a combination of one or two meaningful paragraphs, plus a big chunk of AI generated fluff.

I’m sure the reason for that is because we’re also still in the Age of SEO, and Google really wants an article to be more than a few lines long. (That’s also why you need to read ten pages about Grandma’s rustic kitchen decor and her ritual of lovingly feeding the chickens every morning for 20 years when you were just trying to find a recipe for cookies on Google.) You need to write longer articles for Google so you can sprinkle in the keywords that matter.

Just like non-fiction books are often five times longer than they need to be, because to justify the retail price the publisher demands at least 200 pages.

But those books were still all human written (nowadays? who knows).

So nowadays probably millions of human-hours are being frittered away as people read paragraphs of machine-generated content which was generated with another machine as the primary audience.

We are now a middleware layer in the paperclip factory, with AIs optimizing their revenue above us, and different AIs optimizing their revenue below us. Our attention is the transit pipe.

In recognition of the concern, this is a short, fully AI-free post.