Should AI Write Our Fiction?

I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we’re not sure we can do. Along the way, I am committing a minor sin in the world of writing – I am writing about writing.

But wait, don’t bail, here’s a topical tidbit to keep you engaged: I’m also going to write about AI, and who doesn’t want to hear more about that?! My prompt, as it were, is “Audience of One,” a post by Mario Gabriele, who writes the interesting and hyperbolic newsletter The Generalist. Gabriele’s optimistic prose focuses on venture, startups, tech, and tech culture. I find his work thought provoking and sometimes infuriating. “Audience of One” falls into the latter category.

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“Ready Later This Year”

After I write my annual predictions, I keep a little file of stories that relate to my prognostications. The most active one so far – if you tune out my opening line that “this is not going to be a normal year” – is #3: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.” It may be hard to recall, but by the end of last year, AI agents and “the agentic web” were all the rage, pushed as the Next Big Thing by just about everyone who had a stake in tech’s Numbers Go Up economy.

But it struck me that there was a lot of wood to chop between the hand waving of tech optimists and the reality of how complex systems actually work. I noted that the most significant structural impediment was Big Tech’s business model, which is reliant on consumer advertising and enterprise subscriptions and sales. Agents, as I pointed out in Where’s The Business Model in Chat-Based Search?, will likely undermine traditional consumer advertising models employed by Google and Meta. As for the enterprise, well, inter-operability been the bugaboo and the holy grail of enterprise software for as long as enterprise software has existed. Without protocols that allow developers to integrate across diverse systems, agents are never going to take off.

It takes years, not weeks, for such protocols to emerge and gain widespread support. Earlier this year I wrote about Anthropic’s MCP, which addresses a core issue: data connectivity (OpenAI recently announced support for MCP.) But MCP doesn’t address a host of other integration issues, including user interface, directory services, communication handling, and many other dull-but-important tasks. Aware of this problem, Google this week announced another protocol: A2A.

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Zuck Lobbies Trump: Optics No Longer Matter

There is so much…sh*t flooding the zone of late, it’s hard to grok it all. But when the CEO of one of the richest and most morally questionable companies in tech’s history leverages his access to lobby the President of the United States, and it’s just yet another WTF headline, well, it bears comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest man in the world, visited President Trump, the 700th richest man in the world. His goal? To get the President to call off Meta’s impending antitrust trial, one that could go very poorly for the company, both because of the evidence and testimony such a trial would bring the public light, and because one of the possible remedies would be breaking up Meta entirely.

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The University of Peers and Elders

For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.” 

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine. 

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Facebook Goes Backward. Why?

Earlier this week I met a fellow who, among very many other things, is a member of a bicycling group based where I live. Given that I live in a pretty small community, I was stunned I’d never heard of the club, which has 900 active members and runs four or five organized rides a week. How’d I miss it?

Well, the fellow told me, it’s a Facebook group. You should join! For the first time in ages, I fired up Facebook with the intention of actually doing something useful. I applied to join the group, then promptly forgot about it. I lost the habit of checking into Facebook more than a decade ago, and I have all notifications from the app turned off.

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Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It.

There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!

Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.

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Where’s The Business Model in Chat-Based Search?

 

Google’s AI Overviews feature in its main search service.

Two years ago I wrote a series of posts exploring the business model and interface implications of generative AI-based search. At the time, it was not clear how Google would respond to the existential threat that ChatGPT and its peers seemed to present. If it took root, a chat-like interface to search would fundamentally disrupt Google’s core revenue model. What was the company going to do about that?

I noted that six months into the GPT revolution, Google’s response seemed to be overly cautious. I encouraged the famously slow-moving company to go on offense: “It’s time to push something out to market, it’s time to declare yourself the leader in this new market, and it’s time to lay out a vision for what the future of computing will look like,” I wrote. “Imagine if they had waited until they figured out how to make money before launching Google Search?”

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Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

This is not the network standard we’re looking for.

Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.”

Here’s what I said back in January:

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How Is AI Changing Search? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New data highlighted in Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter codifies what most of us have already assumed: AI chatbot usage is starting to reshape search. And when search changes, so does the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately, the data lacks a fundamental denominator, and as such, only serves to feed the signal-free hype cycle we’re currently in.

The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:

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Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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