Over time it’s become more and more common to hear people talk about ‘the Algorithm’, for example its common to hear YouTube personalities talking about liking their videos and commenting on them to help them get picked up by the algorithm.
Web developers find themselves optimizing websites for search engines, which basically means they are trying to tailor their builds to get picked up by Google’s algorithms that will get it to appear highly in search results. For example since Google has started to add A.I. Generated answers at the top of their search results, people want to build websites with content that can get picked up by this algorithm.
Attention is the currency of the internet. People want their websites or YouTube videos to generate attention which in turn generates revenue. The result is people making websites and content that will “appease” the algorithm. The result is generally that all the content on the internet becomes standardized in terms of tried and tested things that get picked up by the algorithm. The result is that everyone starts to mould themselves in a certain direction.
With the advent of generative A.I. we are starting to see more and more people utilizing these tools either to generate content outright, or simply as a tool for generating ideas. People turn to ChatGPT and ask ‘can you suggest 5 YouTube video ideas about X subject’ to give them something that will be a hit with the algorithm.
Generative A.I. works by being trained on vast amounts of data, so it is by definition going to have bias towards whatever is most common. The combination of the algorithm dictacting what people create, and the algorithms behind generative A.I. being trained on whatever there is most of out there is pushing the internet further and further towards the dull and tedious.
People often talk about A.I. bringing about a revolution, taking our jobs and so on, and there is undoubtedly some truth to that, but it’s also making the internet boring. Everything is tending towards algorithm appeasing, A.I. generated slop.