Bob's Blog
Google Defunds AI Hype Criticism
What happened?
I wrote an article explaining that generative AI as popularized and promoted in the mid 2020s is what philosophy terms bullshit. AI hype isn't necessarily lying, because to lie you have to know the truth and be working to convince people otherwise. Bullshit, such as the generative AI promotion, is produced with no consideration for the truth, quite possibly with no awareness of the truth.
As you surely notice, if you're not using an ad blocker, my pages contain Google AdSense ads. Sorry — not sorry. It's a source of revenue for me. If you do use an ad blocker, you will notice that my pages don't pop up annoying messages about please disable your ad blocker.
Google AdSense tends to be pretty lurid, but it seems to get people clicking on the ads and sending some revenue my way.
After my "generative AI is bullshit" page had been in place for a few weeks, I noticed that many of the ad slots were filled by content that wouldn't generate any revenue for me. Here's a fragment near the center of that page, notice the "Discover more" box and the two lines of blue-on-white clickable capsules:
I was puzzled when I first noticed that non-advertisement block appearing on that page. Finally I recalled that back when I was setting up AdSense, it explained if Google cannot find any relevant ads, it will fall back to a block of links that lead to searches for those terms.
About half of those terms are at least somewhat related to the theme of the page. So, it's not as if Google's supposed "AI" analysis of the content has failed.
And, it certainly isn't the case that Google has no ads related to chatbots, machine learning, or mathematics and statistics.
At least Google hasn't sent a murder drone after me. Not yet, anyway.
Update: In the following days I saw the banner of search links appearing on other pages, both on this site and on Toilet-Guru.com. However, my generative AI critique page continued to have a consistently much higher percentage of its ad slots filled with the non-revenue search links.
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