AI wrappers are eating your lunch - Rethinking the Hype Cycle #5

It (may be) the end of SEO as we know it. And I feel fine 🙃

Hello👋

Welcome to Rethinking the Hype Cycle, your practical guide to AI and what's next in tech for people-first leaders.

We live and work in radically uncertain times for business. I'm having to partition my professional and personal media consumption and get outdoors in these delightfully lucid spring days to stay sane. With retaliatory trade tactics, reversals of equality practices and policies devised from fear and loathing rather than opportunity, the endless rapid pulse of tech change can feel intimidating when you're struggling to keep above water.

Rethinking the Hype Cycle helps you survive the hype with a measured approach to tech adoption. We're in it for the long haul. The robot apocalypse is greatly exaggerated.

Your regular reminder: If you're not working on the bleeding edge, you don't need to bleed.

On to the trends. 👉

AI and frontier tech trends

Is this the end of SEO as we know it?

As AI inserts into your Google feed, and Chatbots are a companion in your pocket for quick answers, search traffic is dropping fast. Gartner predicts search engine use will be 25% less by next year, leading to a halving of organic traffic by 2028.

This will mean brands need new ways to seek digital audiences. Paid media will no doubt eagerly offer an array of payola products for attention. It's a shift similar to social media's rise, which didn't kill search but changed how publishers find readers.

A current concern: AI overviews are starving indie publishers of eyes and income while feeding the pockets of AI-slop creators. Is this a glitch in the algorithm or a downward spiral? Will Google honour its EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) principles of prioritising human over machine-made content?

A more measured take on the shift from search to AI: Could AI search and AI-written content be preferable in some cases? For comms and writer folks, this feels like an adapt-or-die crossroads. Some may value human-originated content, while others might prefer machine assistance as a shortcut to raw info. Horses and/or courses.

For those generating AI words as a responsible tech user, wise words from the brilliant and oft-quoted here, Rachel Coldicutt, c/o Careful Industries.

Operating heavy machinery on auto-Copilot

A study using (ahem) Copilot by Microsoft shows tasks involving complex documents were less mentally fatiguing with AI assistance. A solid use case. But did people understand the materials? Whether that matters or not determines if AI is being used as a 'good' or 'weak' task offload.

Conversely, a WSJ journalist demonstrates why unloading cognitive tasks to AI may not be such a smart move if you want to maintain your cognitive abilities.

The debate about AI summarisation being good or bad is now academic. We all want to cut out dull corners. Yet there's an argument for good friction to enrich thinking. Like taking a long lunch to read and understand a book rather than listening to a Blinkist audio summary at 1.5 speed. Wholefood or fast food? Both give you calories, but with different well-being outcomes.

AI state of mind

A study of how LLMs work examines Anthropic's inner processes. Rather than choosing the next most plausible word sequentially as was previously thought, they work backwards from answers. More "start with the end in mind" than improv. This explains why so-called “hallucinations” in AI models aren't going away.

My AI is better than yours

In a surprise-to-no-one survey by Pew Research Center, AI experts are far more enthusiastic about AI than the US general public. Women are more concerned about AI harm than men; another notch to my increasingly dour take on why women are swimming behind men with AI adoption.

Another survey across the pond explores UK public attitudes to AI. Unsurprisingly, minorities and people on lower incomes aren't seeing benefits. AI awareness is high overall, but many hear stories about autonomous cars, yet few know that AI is involved in assessing social benefits. Arguably, hidden AI is impacting daily life under the covers, more than future tech razzle-dazzle in the media.

Watercooler: The barmy and bluster in big AI hype🚰

Don't prompt too Ghibli