blog/birth-death-seo: prep for publishingbirth-death-seo

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>

1 files changed, 62 insertions, 34 deletions

diff --git a/lume/src/blog/birth-death-seo.mdx b/lume/src/blog/birth-death-seo.mdx
index c7ad413..3ef91bd 100644
--- a/lume/src/blog/birth-death-seo.mdx
+++ b/lume/src/blog/birth-death-seo.mdx
@@ -1,10 +1,14 @@
 ---
 title: "The birth & death of search engine optimization"
-date: 2023-11-30
+date: 2023-11-28
 tags:
   - philosophy
   - ai
   - chatgpt
+hero:
+  ai: Hohaku-XL Beta
+  file: mimi-forest-jogging
+  prompt: A brown-haired catgirl with her hair tied back in a ponytail in a green hoodie runs down an idyllic forest path. She is wearing a pair of blue running shoes and dark green yoga pants. An animal vaguely resembling a fox is running alongside her.
 ---
 
 Searching the Internet for information sucks. We live in an age of information surplus. At any point in the internet there are an unimaginable number of things to read, watch, listen to, and play through. The average person's backlog of entertainment stretches for several lifetimes.
@@ -39,7 +43,7 @@ The use of this technology _exploded_. All the eyes were on the top of the ranki
 
 This is why search engine optimization (SEO) was born. It is a way to game the system and get your website ranked first. Today, it is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it is somehow still growing.
 
-Let's say you have an online store that sells radishes. If you wanted people to be able to find your website, you needed to make sure that it was ranked higly for the word "radishes". The best way that this happened was to get people to write articles about radishes on your website and become seen as an expert in radishes. You would then get a lot of links back to your website (backlinks) from other websites that were about radishes. This would make your website rank higher for the word "radishes".
+Let's say you have an online store that sells radishes. If you wanted people to be able to find your website, you needed to make sure that it was ranked highly for the word "radishes". The best way that this happened was to get people to write articles about radishes on your website and become seen as an expert in radishes. You would then get a lot of links back to your website (backlinks) from other websites that were about radishes. This would make your website rank higher for the word "radishes".
 
 This is why you see so many websites for companies that have a blog section. Half of it is to get people to write about what they enjoy so that they can express themselves in new and interesting ways; but the secret other half is that if you're an expert in radish science, people will really want to buy your radishes.
 
@@ -63,9 +67,40 @@ This has been teaching people that they should not use tools like Google in orde
 
 Above all, this is why it's probably better to learn about new things from ChatGPT instead of Google. ChatGPT has the problem of hallucinating information that isn't true, but at least it's not trying to sell you something.
 
-Yet.
+<XeblogConv name="Numa" mood="delet">
+  Yet.
+</XeblogConv>
+
+## Arsène
 
-And then comes in the AI boom.
+Earlier this year when I got my hands on the ChatGPT API (along with the rest of the world), I decided to make a tool that would generate infinite bullshit about a given topic. This was to help me work through my fears about an Internet full of un-content so that I could put them to the canvas to see how scary they really were. I call the results [Arsène](https://arsene.fly.dev/).
+
+<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
+  For reasons which are trivial and thus an exercise left to the reader, I
+  decided to make this tool generate horoscopes about cryptocurrency. Most
+  financial analysis is just generic bullshit anyway, so it seemed like a good
+  fit.
+</XeblogConv>
+
+Every 12 hours, the Arsène server collects the following information:
+
+- The current phase of the moon
+- The current astrological sign
+- The current and previous price of Ethereum
+- Three tarot card interpretations
+- The top headline about Ethereum
+
+It then uses this information to generate a new article about Ethereum and puts it on the front page of the website. Every day you get two new articles about Ethereum. More if I manually trigger the "generate article" flow to test something.
+
+I don't like explaining these bits of public art. I generally like creating things that make the reader have to evaluate it critically in order to understand what is going on and where. In that view, having to explain art "devalues" it in a way that I can't really put to words. Nonetheless, I feel like the quality of the articles should point you to the fact that it's AI generated fairly instantly.
+
+<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
+  The astounding part is that Arsène uses a 7 billion parameter model too, which
+  is microscopic compared to GPT-3's 130 billion parameters, but it gets the job
+  done well enough.
+</XeblogConv>
+
+And then comes in real influx of the AI boom.
 
 ## Artificial stupidity
 
@@ -100,11 +135,33 @@ Now imagine how this would scale. Swap out radishes for other vegetables and mak
 
 Then bring SEO tools into the mix and analysis of trending conversations on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. This would be a way to systematically churn out infinite amounts of bullshit that would not only drown out everything else, but allow you to sit back and do nothing as the money rolls in.
 
+This is the future that we are in. This is the future that we are living in. This is the future that we are going to be living in for the rest of our lives.
+
+## Multi-track bullshit
+
+Even better, there's goddamn [startups around the idea of making tools for SEO people to automate this](https://writtenlabs.com/). Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to try having it write an article titled "How to cheat at SERP SEO using OpenAI to do all the work for you". I've uploaded it [here](https://paste.shark-harmonic.ts.net/paste/226bda9a-3c84-4dbe-90b2-bd012949ec51/md) in case you want to see what kind of garbage output it gets. I chose to use GPT-4 Turbo 128k for generating this article just so that we got the best possible quality garbage.
+
+This website also will have the ability to do google searches, ingest the first page of results, and then use that to automatically churn out a mountain of bullshit (complete with integration into your CMS of choice!) so that you too can pull off your own SEO heists while doing nothing of value for society yourself.
+
+<XeblogConv name="Aoi" mood="coffee">
+  Is this really going to be the future of our industry? Are we really going to
+  just sit back as AI generated bullshit destroys one of the most powerful tools
+  for learning about new things that humanity has ever created? Surely the
+  search engines will be able to detect this and stop it, right?
+</XeblogConv>
+
+<XeblogConv name="Numa" mood="delet">
+  Oh Aoi, you sweet summer child. You think that the search engines are going to
+  be able to detect this? You think that they're going to be able to stop it?
+  You are so deliciously naïve that I almost don't want to tell you the truth to
+  preserve your innocence.
+</XeblogConv>
+
 And the search engine maintainers can't really do anything about it because AI algorithms can't reliably detect if a given bit of text is AI generated or not. They can't just ban all AI generated text because it's impossible for small companies like Google and Microsoft to even _know_ what text was generated by AI or not. They also can't just ban all text that is about radishes because that would be a huge blow to the radish industry.
 
 The main problem with AI generated text is that most people literally cannot tell if a given bit of text is AI generated or not. It's about as good as random chance for most people. This is why I think that AI generated text is going to be the next big thing in content farms.
 
-This is the future that we are in. This is the real [weapon to surpass Metal Gear](https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear/). We are surrounded by information and nearly none of it is useful. Most of it is trying to sell us something. It is an infinite arms race that is destroying the very tools that we use to learn about observable reality.
+This is the future that we are in. This is the real [weapon to surpass Metal Gear](https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear/). We are surrounded by information and nearly none of it is useful. Most of it is poorly attempting to sell us something. It is an infinite arms race that is destroying the very tools that we use to learn about observable reality.
 
 ## The worst part
 
@@ -191,32 +248,3 @@ So then we end up in a situation where content farms can write about sex toys us
 So we're left in a situation where ChatGPT will lie to you, but most of the time its output is truthful enough to learn from. I hate that this is the reasonable take at this point.
 
 Until then, I guess the best CAPTCHA is to ask people how to make a pipe bomb.
-
-## Arsène
-
-Earlier this year when I got my hands on the ChatGPT API, I decided to make a tool that would generate infinite bullshit about a given topic. This was to help me work through my fears about an Internet full of un-content so that I could put them to the canvas to see how scary they really were. I call the results [Arsène](https://arsene.fly.dev/).
-
-<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
-  For reasons which are trivial and thus an exercise left to the reader, I
-  decided to make this tool generate horoscopes about cryptocurrency. Most
-  financial analysis is just generic bullshit anyway, so it seemed like a good
-  fit.
-</XeblogConv>
-
-Every 12 hours, the Arsène server collects the following information:
-
-- The current phase of the moon
-- The current astrological sign
-- The current and previous price of Ethereum
-- Three tarot card interpretations
-- The top headline about Ethereum
-
-It then uses this information to generate a new article about Ethereum and puts it on the front page of the website. Every day you get two new articles about Ethereum. More if I manually trigger the "generate article" flow to test something.
-
-I don't like explaining these bits of public art. I generally like creating things that make the reader have to evaluate it critically in order to understand what is going on and where. In that view, having to explain art "devalues" it in a way that I can't really put to words. Nonetheless, I feel like the quality of the articles should point you to the fact that it's AI generated fairly instantly.
-
-<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
-  The astounding part is that Arsène uses a 7 billion parameter model too, which
-  is microscopic compared to GPT-3's 130 billion parameters, but it gets the job
-  done well enough.
-</XeblogConv>