In the past six weeks, the online world has decided that I am passé. People have started ignoring my articles via the website or newsletters like audiences passing over the latest Disney live-action remake.
What has changed? Not me; I’m still brilliant. It’s A.I.
And if you don’t believe me, you should come to the next Science Cafe in Concord.
Yes, that’s right, the beloved institution of the Science Cafe, felled by COVID, is returning next month for a one-night stand at Litherman’s Limited brewery. Amid food and drink, a panel of experts will answer your questions about the technologies known as artificial intelligence — how they work, what they do and don’t do, and what effect they may have on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The event is set for Tuesday, Sept. 15, starting at 6 p.m. Mark your calendars! More details to come.
But to get back to the important subject of me, why did the number of people clicking on my articles plummet starting in May, a trend that continues to this day? And I do mean plummet: from a four-figure click rate per hour to three or even two figures.
Actually, it’s not just me. Online traffic dropped for everybody else at the Monitor, too. And judging from discussion, it’s declined at most online publications and sites.
The culprit, all agree, is obvious: It’s those darn A.I. summaries atop web searches, most notably Google’s AI Overview.
These summaries shovel everything they can read into their maws and spit out the relevant bits on command, providing enough of an answer to a search query that people don’t click through to the actual source. We do the work, software gets the attention.
For example, a recent Google query about the status of ash trees in New Hampshire was topped with a summary of various aspects of the species. Each sentence featured a tiny link, roughly the size of a semicolon, to NHPR or New Hampshire Bulletin or Forest Service documents or last week’s Granite Geek, but the summaries were good enough that very few would click through to the actual sources. My column suffered as a result, and I’m sure the other sources did, too.
This carnage on click-throughs caused by A.I. summaries is so great and happening so quickly that NPR has called it an “extinction-level event” for journalism sites dependent on viewership-based ad revenue. The industry is brainstorming how to react, but a decade of watching us in the media whipsawed by internet technologies makes me doubt there is a solution. Unless the government breaks up Google — yeah, like that’s going to happen — I think the Internet Era for Traditional Media is over.
Due to A.I. and its effect on algorithms from search engines and social-media sites, which increasingly hide stories with links to keep viewers from wandering away, we can’t depend on people finding our stories as part of their daily online existence, no matter how original, deep or entertaining those stories are. And no amount of repackaging or imitating influencers or doubling down on social media is going to change that.
Real news will never be able to whip up viral interest like fake outrage and titillation does, lighting up the lizard-brain portion of a million people at once. Going forward, I think, the only people who will encounter Granite Geek articles are those who want to encounter them rather than were guided by a search. These are people who subscribe to the Monitor or the Granite Geek newsletter or who heard about the article from a friend or saw discussion about it online, and then sought it out.
I think journalists are going to have to work differently to draw interest to our work through non-digital means rather than hoping for gifts from the algorithms of Google or Facebook. What do I mean by non-digital means? Hosting a Science Cafe is a good example!
Maybe this is just the old man in me, but I’m not sure I mind. After all, this is the way things were when I started in the business, pre-internet, and we didn’t do too badly. The parallel is inexact because so much has changed — it’s not like we’re going to return single-copy newstands to every corner — but maybe it’s for the best.
Before I sound too optimistic, however, I’m also afraid that this change is part of the way the entire internet is falling apart. The takeover of the web and email and texting by algorithms and bots, all of them hyper-charged by the black-box software of A.I., is making almost everything on your computer and phone screens worse. It’s not just traditional media that’s getting waylaid.
There’s a decade-old idea labeled the Dead Internet Theory, which says that software fakery created by a secret cabal will drive humans away from the online world. It’s starting to look like its believers were on to something, even if the cause is tragedy of the commons due to capitalistic opportunism, rather than devious plans by the Illuminati.
Maybe we’re at the start of a transition where everybody is going to abandon the digital world and try to make life work in the physical world again.
Just as long as they remember to read their local newspaper.
