We're in an odd, liminal time. For the past 20 years, we've been dealing with the consequences of existent technology — tech that's been around, and we slowly realise will be important. But now, we're waiting, worrying and working towards a technology that's not really here yet: generative search. This particular flavour of search infused with AI will change everything, or so we're told.
But it's not actually here yet. Or, at least, Google's version is only in testing. The US has been able to use it for a few months, and now we in the UK can, too.
On the other hand, there is some existing AI search tech out there. Bing has had a ChatGPT integration for over a year. It's interesting — but slow. And, more to the point, it hasn't moved the needle on Bing's market share dramatically. It's crept up from around 8% to around 10% of search over the last year — which isn't revolutionary, but isn't negligible either. So, there's clearly potential, but it's not gobbling up all queries away from other search engines like Google did in the early 2000s.
Perplexity AI
One example that's slightly more impressive is Perplexity AI. I have used it from time to time, and, it's actually pretty impressive, for some simple queries. It lacks the delay we see in many other AI products, but I only really find myself reaching for it when I want a quick, referenced answer, not when I want something in-depth.
It is, though, a great example of what some search could look like in the coming years.
What we can say with some confidence is that there is a big market opportunity right now. Google, as most of us have experienced over the past few years, is most definitely not what it was. The quality of results is down, and too much over SEOed nonsense is creeping into results. Google has been through bad patches like this before — but has usually managed to turn it around.
This downturn has gone on for too long though, and there might be a good reason why. Ed Zitron has been going through Google's emails that were released as part of a court case, and he's pieced together a fascinating story of the techies devoted to producing a great search engine slowly being edged out by the money guys.
This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Ouch. And he doesn't hold back on the person he perceives as being responsible for the rot: Prabhakar Raghavan. He was previously — get this — head of search at Yahoo!, and presided over its collapse into irrelevance. And Zitron argues that he's doing the same again:
As I’ve argued previously, we — with good reason — continually complain about the state of Twitter under Elon Musk, but I’d argue Raghavan (and, by extension, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) deserve as much criticism, if not more, for the damage they’ve done to society. Because Google is the ultimate essential piece of online infrastructure, just like power lines and water mains are in the physical realm.
It's well worth kicking back this weekend and reading the whole thing:
In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the phrase “enshittification” for the process whereby tech products become palpably worse over time, not better. That phrase has entered the language because it perfectly filled the void for a word that described the process we are all familiar with.
So, obviously, he had something to say about Zitron's piece:
Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomicphenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.
Some people who were in the big publishers before internet disruption really hit might be squirming a little uncomfortably right now. We have seen this process before…
What this all points to, though, is that Google has actually created the perfect environment for its own disruption. Search has become palpably worse just as a new technology arises that provides an alternative way of getting at the same sorts of answers.
Google is having the same sort of “oh, shit” moment that Microsoft went through in the late 90s as it became apparent that this kooky “internet” thing might actually be important. And it's pivoting as hard as it can towards generative AI search — but with the knowledge that even if it manages the transition, its business model may well still be screwed.
The proposed revamp to its cash cow search engine would mark the first time the company has put any of its core product behind a paywall, and shows it is still grappling with a technology that threatens its advertising business, almost a year and a half after the debut of ChatGPT.
Google is still an ad business, and if people aren't seeing ads in search results or ads on webpages, because they never leave the AI interface, it's not just publishers in trouble. Google itself is. It could be that, if SGE succeeds, that success will slowly starve Google of the massive cash flow it's been used to.
AI could gorge itself into starvation
And here's the big AI dilemma: if AI wins, it loses. If people just use AI instead of visiting search engine results or websites themselves, the amount of (non-AI generated) content on the web will start to dry up, because the economic and social incentives vanish.
And if that happens, what does the AI train on? The big AI companies are already starting to struggle with finding new training data. Sure, there's milage yet to be had in building better models with existing data, but this tech is voracious for two things: energy and raw data.
So, maybe they could train AIs on the output of other AIs? So far, that's not going well. It leads to model collapse. If you think existing AI hallucinations are a problem, just wait until you see what model collapse does. And bear in mind that we don't actually know how much of today's web is AI-generated. But we do know that the percentage is creeping up every single day. AIs are going to end up poisoned by AI-generated data sooner or later.
So, we're not just looking at a potential disruption of existing search practices here. We're looking at a complete collapse of the current publishing, advertising and AI ecosystems. This is speed running enshittification, rushing out a new technology to maximise profits now, while burning the planet to run it, and destroying the economic basis of all the human activity that feeds the AI.
Fuc… Flip.
I don't know about you, but I've got that “watching a road crash that now can't be avoided” feeling.
The big “if”s…
Let's step back a second. I'm guilty of catastrophising, as my counsellor often tells me. I'm outlining an extreme case, with a lot of built-in assumptions in it. For example, will AI search actually replace all existing search? It might not. Sure, there are some categories that are more vulnerable than others. If you've built a business on affiliate revenue from reviews and buyers guides, you need to look at new revenue models and soon.
Ian Betteridge has made this point in the past, but others are catching on. Bauer's global head of SEO, Stuart Forrest talked about this at the PPA conference this week:
Forrest acknowledged the potential severity of the arrival of SGE, saying that although publishers don’t build business models on answering questions like “how tall is Tom Cruise?” for which Google already provides a quick answer, they do monetise the answers to more nuanced queries like “what is the best laptop for me to buy for my gaming child under £1,000?”
His point, though, is that LLM's tendency to make stuff up — “hallucinate” — means that it remains unreliable for many things:
“It’s absolutely staying clear of some very contentious issues like the gun debate in the US or the US election. I would not want SGE to be telling me whether my child’s rash might be meningitis, and actually I think Google probably wouldn’t…”
We've been here before: social media has been stealing the “I just need something to read” traffic that Google used to get for 15 years now. It adapted and grew, evolving into and “intents and answers” engine over that time. If generative AI search is going to steal some more use cases away from it, it will need another evolution: towards trusted, in-depth information from identifiable people, with actual expertise in the subject.
That could work for them. It could work for us in the journalism racket. And it could even work for the AI companies, as a steady supply of fresh training data would result. But that depends on Google still having the technical acumen to build both a compelling search experience and a compelling generative answer machine at the same time — and to deliver on a user interface that would make both work.
I'd have trusted the Google of 10 years ago to do that. Today's Google? I'm not so sure. And is we barrel down the current path, with AI destroying the business model for the very data it needs, it's hard to see anybody winning in the digital chaos that will follow.
Fasten your safety belts. There's serious digital turbulence ahead, folks.
Well, the US Senate actually went and did it. The wheels are in motion to ban TikTok there. This is something very new to those of us in the western world: a government trying to shut down a social media app.
When I started writing here over 21 years ago, what we now call social media was largely a joke to the majority of people. Those of you old enough will remember Andrew Marr calling bloggers “inadequate, pimpled and single”, and people dismissing Instagram as people posting what they had for their lunch.
Once signed by the president, ByteDance would have up to a year to complete a sale of TikTok or face an effective ban for the platform in the US. The bill gives ByteDance an initial nine months and gives the president discretion to extend it another three should there be progress toward a deal.
Biden has already committed to signing it. So, the clock is ticking on TikTok in the US, although, in theory, that period extends into the term of the next US President…
The interesting part of this is that we’ll find out pretty quickly how important TikTok is to the soft influence operations of China based on how they react. If they sell, then, yes, it’s just a business. If they don’t, or try to come to some form of weaselly compromise, we’ll know that the worst fears about TikTok being used as a tool of the Chinese government are, at least partially, true.
Interesting times, indeed.
Obviously, a sale would be good news to those newsrooms who have committed time and effort into building TikTok teams. And a ban would be worse news because it’s likely other governments elsewhere in the world would follow the same path, once it becomes clear that TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool.
“The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns,” Apple said in an emailed statement to Reuters. “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.”
Long-term China watchers will be unsurprised by this. The internet on the other side of the Great Firewall of China is a quite unfamiliar place, and largely revolves around WeChat these days.
It’s a stark reminder of the political differences between the two nations that a TikTok ban was mooted back in the (first?) Trump administration, and is only now becoming a reality. While China can and does shut down non-local social media swiftly and efficiently.
The next year will be very interesting for anyone deeply committed to social video…
Threads] also remains utterly humorless; to find a handful of good posts to conclude each edition of Platformer, I now have to scroll through approximately 40 screen-miles of progressive activism on Bluesky to find three posts reminiscent enough of Weird Twitter to justify inclusion.
Obligatory AI corner
Adobe has announced some major new AI features in its creative Cloud apps. Firefly, its generative AI image creator, is getting an update, which allows more photorealistic imagery:
I've had a play, and while the results are often impressive, it really doesn't want to give you results which are moody or challenging. Midjourney handles that sort of stuff much better. But if you're looking for free stock images (that are helping burn the world…), then it's worth a look.
And lots of these features are finding their way into Photoshop, too:
There's been a minor storm brewing around journalism ethics, that's centred on one of the most popular journalists in the world. But, because he's a YouTuber and a reviewer, the storm hasn't moved much out of the tech world.
Massive YouTube star Marques Brownlee ruthlessly deconstructed the Humane AI Pin, a badge that aims to replace your phone. (Notice that every new hardware product needs an AI component…) You can get the general tenor of his review from the headline:
If you don't fancy watching the whole of that video, you can get the general idea from this excerpt on X:
NEW Video - Humane Pin Review: A Victim of its Future Ambition
This clip is 99% of my experiences with the pin - doing something you could already do on your phone, but slower, more annoying, or less reliable/accurate. Turns out smartphones… pic.twitter.com/QPxztCuBls— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) April 14, 2024
Ouch.
Should reviewers “do no harm”?
It's fair to say that some of the tech industry were less than impressed by his review. This X post in particular kicked off a storm:
I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers.
Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness.
Blimey. This guy — a minor Twitter influencer with courses on tech entrepreneurship to sell — is genuinely asserting that reviewers shouldn't give a bad review because that might hurt the company. Could I perhaps suggest that it isn't really the bad review that's hurting the company — it's the bad product? The reviewer is merely accelerating the process by spreading the news more quickly. Word would get out soon enough when purchaser started getting them. And some of those people have been saved a lot of money by Brownlee's review.
A journalist's duty is to the readers
As Ian Betteridge, himself a long-term reviewer, put it:
“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.
This should be obvious. So why would Vassallo be so surprised by what Brownlee said? Simple. He, like so many other tech industry hangers-on, has become accustomed to a largely compliant and uncritical tech-centric press.
For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.
🔥🔥🔥. And there's more:
Few writers have been as instrumental to this process as Swisher. In Burn Book, she tries to atone for her decades of boosterism by adopting a slightly more critical posture, but the analysis, such as it is, has no bite because Swisher still, at her core, fundamentally believes in Silicon Valley.
The role of journalism in tech
Too much of the tech media has been little more than an extension of the PR arms of the tech giants. You can see it in the reaction of the “tribes” of tech media: the ones that are loyal to Apple, the Google followers, the start-up evangelists. Their sceptical, cynical takes are the exception, rather than the rule.
And look how many tech journalists have been assimilated into the startup world as venture capitalists: Mike Arrington, Om Malik, MG Siegler. While the mainstream press ignored the burgeoning tech sector for too long, and then swung wildly between criticism and boosterism when it too it seriously, the specialist press has always had an uneasily cosy relationship with these tech companies.
If that relationship is over, it will came as a big shock to people like Vassallo. They've had a couple of decades to get used to an easy ride. But people like Brownlee are so successful that they don't need to worry about the potential backlash of a negative review. They're not reliant on access to the tech companies for their reporting, because they have an audience and a revenue model that works.
So, finally, proper journalism is coming to the tech world, step by step, product by product. Brownlee summed this up perfectly, in his reply to Vassallo's post:
It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.
Post News, just in case you’ve forgotten, was a web-based would-be Twitter successor that had forged close relationships with a handful of newspapers. But it never got much traction, and part of that might have been due to the lack of a mobile app. John Gruber:
But I think Post shot itself in the foot right out of the gate going web-only. They eventually got around to putting an “app” in the App Store but it’s just a thin wrapper around their website — so thin that you can drag-and-drop the tab controller buttons and see exactly which PWA framework they used from the custom URLs shown in the drag proxy. People don’t want to use PWAs; they want real apps. Native iOS apps are so important to social networking that Threads launched app-only for its first two months before launching its web version.
And, sure enough, it was a lack of growth that killed the product, according to Bardin:
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.
That’s the problem with building a social startup on VC money: if you don’t get the growth, they just lose interest.
The “News” in “Post News”
In theory, journalists should have been all over this. It had a business model that included micropayments for access to store news stories. Among its founding ideas were:
– Buy individual articles from different premium news providers so you can access multiple perspectives, not just the ones you're subscribed to– Read content from various sources in a clean interface without jumping to different websites
It is not surprising. It lacked dynamism and excitement, even as an early adopter and a former media professional. Given the overwhelming emphasis they put on establishment media, I am not surprised.
In other words, they tried to build a new social network built on the idea of preserving the traditional media. And yet, they didn’t even manage to pull in the digital-first media types. Take Chris Sutcliffe of Media Voices:
I either never knew or have forgotten about Post News. In the wake of Twitter’s demise (RIP) a number of platforms emerged that sought to capture the bird site’s audience, but with a number of tweaks.
If someone who helps run a podcast and newsletter about the future of media has forgotten about your news-supporting social startup, you’re well and truly stuffed. Post News’s biggest advocates were likely to be the newspapers it had partnered with. If they weren’t pimping the product, the growth mountain was always going to be a tough ascent.
Jason Tabeling
Edward Zitron
Cory Doctorow
Charlotte Tobitt
