as one does, I’ve been googling a lot of stuff recently and it’s crazy that more than a year in they still insist on putting wrong information via AI overview at the top of almost every search. crazy how quickly ive become accustomed to reflexively scroll past/ignore

"And I never say no" We need to have a serious talk about the way "AI companion" apps not only prey on the vulnerable, but are priming their users to ignore consent and to conflate love with control. We need AI regulations across so many sectors, but this area is particularly horrifying.

“Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year.” 🔗 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“The paradox is that we have access to more sources of information than ever, and we end up resorting to only one. Chatbots and AI results are the information jail of our time.” ~ @estherpaniagua.bsky.social 🔗 elpais.com/opinion/2025...

Finally got around to watch this Drew Gooden video. He's presenting what a whole lot of journalists and researchers have been writing about the AI industry with the intensity of someone who is rightly pissed off.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

"AI is a direct attack on the way we verify information: AI both creates fake sources and obscures its actual sources. That is the opposite of what librarians do, and teachers do, and scientists do, and experts do." 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

“Farage told us the flag-raisers were just ordinary folk sticking it to the system. A few months worth of local journalism later, that now looks like a shaky claim.” 🔗 manchestermill.co.uk/the-men-who-...

“Farage told us the flag-raisers were just ordinary folk sticking it to the system. A few months worth of local journalism later, that now looks like a shaky claim.” 🔗 manchestermill.co.uk/the-men-who-...

Reddit's AI product provided dangerous advice in medical subreddits and moderators can't turn it off www.404media.co/reddit-answe...

“These findings follow previous research which concluded that the more people learn about how AI works, the less they trust it. The opposite was also true — AI’s biggest fans tended to be those who understood the least about the tech.” 🔗 futurism.com/artificial-i...

The generative AI wave isn’t coming — it’s already here, and it’s reshaping how the public finds information. www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/peop...

“OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.” 🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

"In the age of Big Tech feeding large language models with stolen information in order to sell you the dream of AI, Alphabet decided to kill its golden goose and, with it, the free and open web that created the conditions for Google Search to thrive." housefresh.com/beware-of-th...

“The model is mimicking the training data. There’s no magic.” 🔗 wapo.st/3Il19l4

TIL that LinkedIn will start using our personal data and content to train their AI models. This setting is set to “on” by default, unless you opt out. ➜ You can turn it off here: www.linkedin.com/mypreference... Or go to Profile > Settings > Data Privacy > Data for Generative AI Improvement

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

As a digital-first business, the fruits of my team’s labour live and die on the web. Yet, in 2025, the way we work could make some label us “Luddites.” Here is why we are holding the line against the AI tide that is sweeping our industry away: neomam.com/a-case-for-h...

AI Slop Is Drowning Out Human YouTubers 🔗 www.404media.co/podcast-ai-s...

Breaking Google up was one of the last best hopes for preventing the free press from getting squeezed into oblivion and harvested into AI slop, and for saving the open web. The ruling that effectively lets Google continue operating as a monopoly isn't just disappointing, it's a disaster.

"GPT-4o provided detailed instructions, helped Adam obtain alcohol on the night of his death, validated his final noose setup, and hours later, Adam died using the exact method GPT-4o had detailed and approved.” 🔗 arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

New from 404 Media: crime-awareness app Citizen is using AI to generate alerts, and then pushing them without any human involvement. The AI is publishing incorrect info, gory details, personal data. Only fixed after live. Comes as Citizen laid off 13 union workers www.404media.co/citizen-is-u...

Six Google searches that tell the story of how Google stole the internet ⇓ youtu.be/GvaOUFwXjf4

“Trust me bro” 🔗 blog.google/products/sea...

Washington, D.C. has become the most surveilled city in the world, with 44 government-accessible CCTV cameras per 1,000 people. More than Beijing, Moscow, or London.

“There’s a lot of humans with genuine opinions on Reddit. But HouseFresh found entirely spam subreddits, all posts promotional and written by chatbots. No human ever goes there. The purpose is for Google to see the spam, think ‘oh it’s on Reddit’ and feed it to the search index and AI overviews.“

“Like it or not, Google has a business to run and it is not going to let something as simple as the desires of its end users get in the way of all that.” ~ @ernie.tedium.co 🔗 tedium.co/2025/07/25/g...

This is how websites die. Data from @pewresearch.org shows that Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after being presented with an AI Overview compared to result pages without one. 🔗 www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Are you worried about AI turning us into mushy-brained monsters, draining resources, slurping your data, preying on vulnerable minds, wiping out jobs, choking websites, lying to you or not being useful? @shiraovide.bsky.social explains how to turn it off in search results: wapo.st/4712tmO

I had the chance to talk to @shiraovide.bsky.social the other day about my fix-Google discovery, @udm14.bsky.social—which still works more than a year later! She wrote about it (along with some recent DuckDuckGo improvements) here: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The stuff that happens when our data shows what manufacturers won’t tell you. 🔗 youtu.be/RNonfByE9xc

A new Commodore device hit pre-orders this week after weeks of rumors. But retro is nothing if not its irrational haters. https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17091891/commodore-revival-community

Whew: a reminder how shockingly unreliable Google AI overviews are (and to some degree, anything AI offers as ‘knowledge’?) - it seems they're taking blurb from press releases, sponsored posts and products listings and offering it up as “facts”: housefresh.com/beware-of-th... (via @ernie.tedium.co).

“Chatbots (including the “AI Overviews” in Google search) paraphrase information […] You might rarely click a web link to find out more, as you do with conventional Google searches. That behavior is causing carnage for websites.” ~ @shiraovide.bsky.social 🔗 wapo.st/4kxvr0I

This is a great piece by @ichbingisele.bsky.social and if you haven't read it yet ... you should this weekend. housefresh.com/beware-of-th... #seo #google #search #AI

We spent weeks researching air purifiers we reviewed to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice. Our analysis shows that AIO will likely recommend buying whatever you show interest in, even if the product doesn’t exist.

Be ware, be aware. With AI overview Googlol is a gimmicky publisher for gimmick products & services. ⬇️⬇️

Are Google AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? Well, it turns out this rabbit hole is a deep one. housefresh.com/beware-of-th...

Running HouseFresh has been an uphill battle. First, we had to fight for independent websites like ours to still show up on Google. Then, we had to fight for our critical product reviews to stay online. In this video, we share the full story: youtu.be/RNonfByE9xc

"The internet is getting fundamentally broken." 🔗 www.jalopnik.com/1884156/ai-s...

🔴Engineered Estrangement | An Interview with Cory Doctorow The author, activist, and technology critic Cory Doctorow on reckless broligarchs and what their 'enshittified' platforms are doing to our future www.bylinesupplement.com/p/engineered...

AI bot scrapers are hitting every site on the web in search of training data. This report is the first good attempt to evaluate the impact of these AI scrapers, especially on smaller institutions that are trying to make their collections open to the public www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

Google wrote the rules, they created the game and they rewarded the players. Now they're turning around and saying, 'That's my infrastructure, the web just happens to live in it.’ 🔗 www.bbc.com/future/artic... by @thomasgermain.bsky.social

“It’s a monopolist’s web, and we’re just publishing in it.” ~ @natehake.bsky.social 👉 How Google uses AI to control the flow of information online: travellemming.com/perspectives...

“The signals from Google are clear: It’ll do anything to win the AI race. If that means burying the web, then so be it.” ~ @jwherrman.bsky.social 🔗 nymag.com/intelligence...

Google AI Overviews will give you an answer even if what you’re searching for is the meaning of a made up idiom. They are killing thousands of websites for this crap.

“The AI-generated answers have caused traffic to independent sites to plummet […] That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.” ~ @davey.bsky.social 🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“Because Google’s AI is trained on the web, its answers are a kind of remixed version of the web itself, while also distorting the economy that gave rise to the modern internet by potentially cutting the sites out of the equation entirely.” ~ @davey.bsky.social 🔗 bloom.bg/41W2wwl