Ramin HonaryCan’t escape the slop <p>I disabled <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/ai" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AI</a> assist on <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/duckduckgo" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DuckDuckGo</a>, but even when I do, I still get a bunch of search results that point me to 100% AI-generated web pages. Nowadays anyone can just fuzz search engines like <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/google" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Google</a> for lists of commonly searched queries, then generate slop responses to these queries, then cache the slop, and then use shady SEO techniques to get these slop pages to show up at the top of search results. And this is what I have been getting from a lot of my web searches lately, content from slop shops.</p><p>A part of me thinks companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon may <em>themselves</em> be investing in these shady slop shops to deliberately make traditional search engines useless, which would “incentivize” people to use <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/llm" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#LLM</a> -based AI like Gemini or <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/chatgpt" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ChatGPT</a> more often, though that is purely speculation on my part.</p><p>If you had asked my 20 years ago that the <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/internet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Internet</a> of the future would rapidly devolve and become increasingly useless as time went on, I would have dismissed you as a paranoid crackpot. Here we are in the future and I still can hardly believe how shitty technology is becoming.</p><p><a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/tech" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#tech</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/rant" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#rant</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/ai" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/enshittification" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#enshittification</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/searchengine" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SearchEngine</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/llm" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#LLM</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://fe.disroot.org/tag/slopshop" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SlopShop</a></p>