Category: Book Related

I’ll Be Framing My AI Check

This is a fake check!

I’ve always loved writing, and took to this form – the “thinking out loud” version of blogging – more than 20 years ago. I started Searchblog after I sold my first book, which focused on the impact of search on business and culture.  I decided I’d chronicle my reporting and build my voice by posting as often as I could, and the experience proved to be a watershed moment in my career. I built an audience that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, noticed scores of others doing the same, then launched a new company (Federated Media) based on insights from the experience.

The early 2000s marked the apex of what is now called “the open web,” and today two stories may as well be considered obituaries for the era.  The first, by Kate Conger at the NYT, lays out the mechanism for the open web’s demise: “Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed.” The second brings news of a $1.5 billion settlement in a massive copyright infringement lawsuit targeting the AI industry. As an author, I’m a party to that suit – and at some point in the next year, a check from Anthropic will wend its way through the mail to me. A coda, of sorts, for an era already passed.

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The Rhymes of Tech History

Big Brother, indeed.

It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assignments in the newsroom. We had another reporter who focused on spreadsheets. Because I was the new kid, I covered databases – databases! – and other reporters covered desktop publishing software and utilities. At just one publication, that’s a half a dozen full-time reporters tracking and analyzing applications that have mostly faded into the background noise of today’s tech industry. At the time (late 1980s), there were at least a dozen outlets doing the same thing.

Think about that – nearly one hundred journalists covering workplace software!

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Google Encloses The Web

Last month Google announced the most significant change to its search product since its launch in 1998. Its iconic search box, which I’ve long compared to a command line for the Internet, has been redesigned to incorporate multi-modal chatbot capabilities. In essence, Google is no longer going to send you off to the best possible destination for your query. Now it’s built to capture your input and convert it into answers (and actions) all in one place – on Google.com.

Google’s announcement was expected – the company had to compete with the new paradigm of “answer engines” from OpenAI and Anthropic. But when the shoe did drop, my inbox filled with trepidation. Google has been the beating heart of the Internet’s circulatory system. Now that it’s evolved into a self-contained walled garden, how will the open web survive?

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Is AI Inherently Anti-Social?

 

Are you feeling lucky, or lonely?

All aboard ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!

– Crazy Train, Ozzy Osborne (with slight modifications)

***

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Data Is Non Rivalrous. Why Have We Enclosed It?

One of the many reasons I’m a fan of reading history is its ability to offer frameworks for understanding the present. I recently finished Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, a 1,300-page monument to scholarship that The New York Times praised as “generational” in its importance. I tend to agree. Its pages contain foundational truths which enliven today’s debate around the role of technology in society.

Beckert argues that over the past millennium, capitalism’s amoral ideology of “accumulation above all else” has become so deeply embedded in the global political economy that we no longer question its core assumptions.

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Your Conversations With AI Are Now On Sale

OpenAI’s early Ads Manager interface, as posted on Search Engine Roundtable.

Data-driven performance advertising built the modern internet, warts and all. Data has become the most valuable resource in our economy, and the world’s most profitable companies have all organized around enclosing, extracting, processing, refining, and exploiting this new asset class.

Yesterday, OpenAI released its first performance advertising product. Marketers can now purchase “cost per click” advertising on ChatGPT, which means they can compare how money spent on OpenAI measures up to similar platforms like Google, Meta/Instagram, Apple, and Amazon, among many, many others. And if OpenAI’s offerings fail to compete, the company will have no choice but to modify its products to drive better performance.

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The Web We Want Vs. The Web We Have

The Warrant for the Town of Oak Bluffs, MA.

Are you frustrated with how the internet works?

Me too. Today I’m going to think out loud about why.

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First Person Singularities, Epistemic Supply Chains, and Load Bearing Euphemisms: An Interview with Claude.ai

Big dreams.

I woke this morning to news that OpenAI plans on growing its advertising business from zero to more than $100 billion in the next four years. If that sounds utterly bonkers to you, well, you’re not alone.

For OpenAI to accomplish such a monumental task, it would have to leverage the database of intentions in ways that would make the assumptions inherent to today’s internet advertising landscape seem quaintly non-intrusive.

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The Withline

 

The Withline

I spend a lot of time engaged in the craft of writing – I’ve penned more than 1.5 million words on Searchblog alone. Writing anchors nearly all my projects, from teaching at universities to my board and investing work, not to mention the hundreds of pieces I’ve either authored or edited at places like P&G Signal and DOC. I write a few pages nearly every day in longhand journal (I’ve filled nearly 30 of them over the past four decades), and I recently embarked on a long-form writing project that may (or may not) produce another book over the coming months.

So writing matters to me, and I’ll admit I’m uncomfortable with how generative AI is changing my chosen field. I recoil from the idea of AI-written articles, blog posts, or academic assignments. And I support the various efforts by authors, journalism institutions, and creative groups who are pushing back against what feels like wholesale theft of our work to train LLMs.

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Product, Platform, Interface, Medium, Language: What Is AI?

Thanks, Marshall.

What is AI?

I’ve been struggling with this rather basic question for several years now, so today I figured I’d write out loud about it, and see if anything coherent surfaces.

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