AI slop is everywhere, and it’s just part of what I perceive of a larger problem of media decay.
We’re at a point where media is no longer about information or entertainment, but about how long someone’s attention span can be captured.
The more something captures your attention, even if you get nothing out of it, the greater virality that content will achieve, and this translates to profits for media platforms and creators.
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A common strategy now is to have stock photos or AI images with any headline.
“Amazon has a Milwaukee utility knife on sale.” Which one? You have to click.
“Nationwide recall on chicken.” What kind? Where? You have to click.
“Recall on tools sold at Home Depot.” What tools? Why? You have to click.
And when you do, it’s just garbage content.
Wow, Amazon has the Milwaukee FastBack 6-in-1 utility knife for $19? Amazon says that over 9,000 were bought in the past month.
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Home Depot’s holiday deal is still ongoing, where you get 2 for $19.97.
That’s just 78 cents more than the Amazon reseller price for 1.
Nationwide magazines and newspaper channels keep pumping out “deals” like that, and worse.
One post claimed that the tool-only Dewalt oscillating multi-tool was “a steal,” when it was around $115. At that time, you could buy a KIT for $99.
These kinds of posts come through my news feed every day, and it’s infuriating.
People should do their due diligence, but they don’t.
When online forums were more popular, it was rare for people to ask simple questions, and they were often met with a “let me google that for you” link to a search that brings up the answer.
These days, I see this on a daily basis on Reddit and elsewhere, where too many people are asking questions for others to answer. But the questions aren’t difficult.
For example, someone will say they’re an engineering student and want to get into robotics. “How do I get into robotics?” GO THE LIBRARY. CHECK THE FAQ. ASK YOUR ADVISOR. What did they search for so far? They won’t answer questions like that because their first stop was to ask strangers on Reddit to do the work for them.
But let’s say one does a Google search. There’s not much out there anymore.
I have a project where I’d like to use direct-drive motors like this Waveshare model. Finding information or alternate options has been a challenge. That’s something that might be suitable to ask for help on, and I’ve tried to research it on my own.
How is it that the internet is less useful today than it was 10 and 20 years ago?
Magazines have closed up. Some major online sites have closed, others were sold and turned into content mills. Sometimes I come across an interesting article headline, and it’s beyond a paywall.
But isn’t it great that social media is now flooded with AI videos of mini cordless power tools?
Once something like that trends, copycats post more of the same and it fills my feed.
Even the ads – UNLOCK PEAK LLM PERFORMANCE.
AI is everywhere now. Looking for a new toothbrush? Good news, some Oral-B models now AI brush tracking.
My social media feed is full of memes now.
Hilti’s wasn’t too bad, but tag a contractor who drinks too many energy drinks?
I had my phone on mute. What’s going on with Jonard Tools and a porta potty costume?
At some point, when EVERYTHING is like this, it stops being cute and amusing.
Gearwrench still has a “don’t play by their rules” post at the top of their profile.
Big Tool franchise brands will tell you that those eye-popping price tags are totally justified
As I understand it, Gearwrench’s parent company was basically foreclosed on, and is now owned by the company’s lenders.
Meanwhile, their holiday tool deals don’t seem to have sold very well as there’s still a bunch in stock at local Home Depot stores. The same is true with Crescent, their sibling brand.
I can’t look at Gearwrench or Crescent the same way. Apex Tool Group had so much debt that they are now owned by some of the companies they owed money to.
Nobody talks about any of this anymore.
How many posts, articles, or videos have you seen about Malco Tools and Veto Pro Pac being sold to a private investment firm? Starrett Tools being sold to a private equity firm?
So what are the big magazines and media channels working on?
When they’re not hyping up Amazon and Walmart reseller deals for Milwaukee tools, it’s cheap no-name junk tools. How good do you really think a $65 welder with accessories is going to be?
“Big Milwaukee Tool Deals at Walmart.” They’re just buying the deals from Home Depot and breaking them up.
Ah, USA Today. “Healthy aging starts at the cellular level: Why Fatty15 is changing the game.”
Umm, what? I took a look.
IT’S JUST AN UNDISCLOSED ADVERTORIAL FOR SUPPLEMENTS.
Breaking News: Harbor Freight has cheaper stuff than Home Depot.
There’s so much brain rot, so little substance.
Matt B
There’s so little good info now I went back to magazines (like CR) just to get real info
Lowest common denominator clicks on this stuff though and believes it…
Jared
Have you used AI as a google alternative yet when researching? I.e. use AI to filter out the bad AI or to synthesize multiple information sources.
I’ve found it quite useful when I don’t know a topic well. For example, in recent history I’ve used it to help me buy a replacement transducer for my ultrasonic cleaner, to help me figure what layers are compatible when assembling a custom SAK, to come up with initial jetting when testing a 36mm Keihin PWK (instead of the stock 38mm) on my YZ250, to find a universal remote for my dad that could control his Roku, sound system, TV, DVD player and cable box… etc.
I know you’re not big on it Stuart – but I’ve found answers to those questions using AI much faster than I could by googling, reading forums, etc. It could be a shortcut for your direct-drive questions.
Stuart
Sometimes I’ll look at Google’s AI overviews, but at least 50% of the time it’s impactfully inaccurate or fabricates things.
Chat GPT is hit or miss. For direct-drive motors, it came up with an electric scooter motor on ebay, a similar motor on Alibaba, and an unsuitable brushless motor on ebay.
I have tested both, and cannot yet trust either for things where I don’t already know the answer. Maybe it can be a good starting point for tracking down sources in various platforms.
AIs aggregate and parse through existing content. Too few creators are adding new and useful content to the pool.
The signal to noise ratio is getting worse.
Tim B.
The constancy of it’s inaccuracy or glomming on to the wrong intent of the query is what makes me most of the time gloss over the AI summaries. Such a mixed bag.
zchris87v
I’ve routed my searches through ten blue links to intentionally get rid of the (many times wrong) AI overview. I have to actually take the time to research and formulate my own conclusion. The horror.
Jared
It’s hard to explain the process without writing an essay, but it sounds like you’re only playing with the fringes of what AI can do. It’s answering relatively sophisticated questions for me – but I’m using a premium account, putting it in “extended thinking” mode, of the latest model, and often training it on multiple documents and sources before I get to asking a specific question.
It can research for you too, but you have to prompt it to do that separately. You can even ask it what information you can provide to get a better answer – otherwise it will default to giving you an answer based on what it can easily find. That’s part of the problem – it will always answer, even if it doesn’t have enough information to answer well.
If all you do is type in a simple prompt in the free model, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the results are disappointing.
E.g. If you want to know if you can build a shed in your backyard and whether your plans are compatible, you would have to give it pdfs of your municipality’s land use bylaw, community standards bylaw, the municipal government act, the safety codes act, the building code, etc. (obviously the names of those documents might be different in your jurisdiction). Only once it has all of those to draw on would I assume it could give me a relatively correct and comprehensive answer – and I would still ask it for pinpoint cites to check myself.
Gregor
I second Jared’s comment. Internet search has been dying; actual relevant results are usually so buried deep under sponsored crap and click bait as to be unusable. LLMs (my preference is Anthropic Claude) can filter thru the mass of noise to give you pertinent results in seconds from their existing data model or a smart web search. The search may be limited to paid plans and/or is performed on command.
While the results are sometimes dubious or simply wrong, I nearly always find the proper info thru a dialogue; by questioning the reply or asking it to double check. More complex requests might benefit from extended reasoning.
Upshot is that you can usually get satisfactory (sometimes mind blowing) results if you treat the LLM as a research assistant rather than a search engine. Takes a little more effort, but I’ve found myself considering larger and/or different issues than I originally perused from the conversational process.
I’ve had particularly good results regarding home improvement and creative technical building projects.
isosceles
So, to summarize your comment and the one above – if you
1) pay for a premium AI service;
2) spend a decent chunk of time getting comfortable with its UI;
3) spend another decent chunk of time “training it” out of the habit of returning information that is incorrect, fabricated, and/or nonsensical;
4) always make sure to take enough time to carefully craft detailed, thorough prompts; and
5) remember to fact check all facts,
then there’s a very good chance you will end up with something that’s approximately as useful as a regular search engine from 2010 and a decent librarian?
In the interest of full disclosure, I think that might come off a little too harshly. I don’t think these AIs are useless (and I love librarians). But I do think it’s worth highlighting the fact that increasing the cost of setting up, using, and “maintaining” an AI erodes its usefulness, often with pretty powerful effect. I noticed this for the first time when a friend typed 500 words of prompts to get ChatGPT to write a 200 word email which he then spent another couple of minutes editing.
Stuart
@isosceles
There’s also the strong possibility anything you train an AI with becomes available as broader training methods, and so one has to be careful about providing it with personal or proprietary data.
That’s one reason I decline to use 3rd party spelling/grammar services, because there tend to be clauses that your data can be used to improve the quality of such services.
Also, “prompt engineering” is apparently a job now.
Jared
@isosceles
No – I’m suggesting it can do MUCH more than “a regular search engine from 2010 and a decent librarian”.
In my shed example, you can figure out the answer yourself, but it would take time. How much time? Depends on your familiarity with the documents I referenced.
With AI, you should have an answer in a couple minutes – maybe a little longer if you have to hunt down the documents the AI needs to read (but you have to do that even if you’re going to read them yourself).
You should still spend a few more minutes checking the citations to make sure you agree with the interpretation and there are no hallucinations (if the correctness of the answer is important). It’s no longer the case that hallucinations are regular occurrences though – you’re probably getting a correct answer 95% of the time or more, but sometimes it simply must be 100%.
That’s still a massive time savings. More so if it’s a topic you’re not familiar with and you would have to learn the base knowledge just to start answering the question.
Mark M.
For those of us old enough to remember the launch of email, it 100% would have died off had it not been for spam filters. Think about your Gmail account without a filter…it would be unusable.
I agree with the assessment of the internet/media in general, and to me it feels like the inflection point where email got so trashy that a solution was implemented to keep it functional. This is where my value-add drops off b/c I don’t know what the solution is for this broader problem, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a parallel and that some fix is going to come. I mean it has to, right? When things get so trashy that eyeballs are leaving screens, the companies paying to reach our eyeballs will be incentivized to fix it.
PB
I think this is a great point. It will definitely take a better algorithm to discern, or the bottom-line.
TomD
Those who know find oases or islands of content, such as this. But they have to be defended and are hard to start new (Stuart would be hard-pressed today to start something like Toolguyd from scratch amongst all the noise out there).
The vast majority of eyeballs are perfectly happy with slop content because none of this is very important to them, or anything.
Wes
Cory Doctrow has some thoughts on this…
John e
The problem is, they tend to shoot the messanger. Especially if the messanger has some bad news.
Ben
I literally just finished his book Enshittification the other day. It kind of reads like an extended rant, but has some decent ideas on how to reverse the slopamorphosis we’re living through.
EBT
Hate to break it to ya, kid. But comicbooks, they’ve been a scam to take kids money. Even the ads like Xray Glasses, or complete army men war set, are shill junk you mail away that yard work and newpaper delivery money you saved for, to get junk back.
(Oh, but if you kept that #1 Superman and didn’t trade it or get bullied out of it after school…)
FFWD to the checkout aisle of any store, and its plastered with magazines and junk you don’t need. Its all profit to the store for you to buy that gum or giftcard or buy that gossip/soap opera/social media rag.
FFWD to web stores with lackluster sales, discount codes (if you can still find/use them) and images/ads on websites or “influencer” tales of how great this tool is…
Problem is, AI slop will go away and then we’ll really be into a mess. Uncanny valley indeed…
Stuart
But there’s two-way value in comic books. Where’s the value in a bazillion AI videos showing anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables eating pieces of themselves?
John e
It’s part of the long process of pulverizing our critical thinking skills into a gooey pulp. There’s method in this madness.
fred
We are more and more being fed what others think we want to hear. Our internet searches may soon become totally AI directed based on some profile of us that is generated by an algorithm. An AI savvy retailer may start setting prices for individual consumers based on what they can find about our income, spending patterns and/or tolerance for overpaying. Internet search engines already help you shop based on your location. Will they soon be coerced into tailoring search results to maximize their profits – possibly even excluding less profitable (to them) retail outlets or products?
Tim B.
“How is it that the internet is less useful today than it was 10 and 20 years ago?”
… This resonates with me. One of the most frustrating aspects of this is the lack of ability to specifically or precisely search for something. Years ago, it used to be that a lot of the time knowing WHAT you were searching for (literally, specifically what it is called, etc) was one of the hardest challenges. If you KNEW what you were looking for specifically, you could search for it *specifically*.. and expect to just get those results, if desired.
These days, that has flipped on its head. On the slightly positive side… AI and similar functionality (image search, etc.) can sometimes help you figure out what you are looking for (what it is specifically called or referred to)… but it seems to at the expense of being able to *EXACTLY SEARCH* for a specific thing NOTHING ELSE. It seems incredibly difficult to get an answer of “no results found” (which in my opinion, is a perfectly valid response and sometimes very helpful to know).
MM
This has been a huge gripe of mine too. I know that some platforms–mainly stores like Amazon, Ebay, Home Depot, etc–have figured out that if they display something ‘close enough’ to the search terms they might get a bite.
For example, let’s say I search for the model ABC123 drill. If they don’t stock that model they might return “no results found”, in which case they don’t get to sell me a drill. But suppose instead they show me a bunch of other drills that aren’t model ABC123. There’s a chance, slim perhaps but it’s there, that I might buy one of those other models instead, in which case they made some money.
So I know why they do that, but man, it is frustrating. A few months ago I was trying to find a brass medallion on Etsy to decorate a gift I was making. My searches kept getting flooded with “horse brass”, which are apparently a type of medallion that people collect. I wanted to exclude the term “horse” from my search, but the minus sign command didn’t work. I ended up chatting with Etsy customer support who told me straight-up that the minus command had worked at one time, but they had chosen to disable the ability to exclude things from their searches. Currently I find Etsy to be nearly unusable because there are so many false positives in the search. I don’t have the time to sift through that much junk to find the items I do want, especially when the site is as slow as it is. Ebay’s searches have gotten much worse lately too, most searches are filled with tons of false positives, but at least you can still use quotes to force terms to appear and the minus sign to exclude terms.
Johnathon
I find that the Lowe’s and Home Depot app searches are so bad that I just Google the thing I want and open it from there, which then pushes me back to the app. Trying to find a 3/0 6/8 RH full lite door in the app? Good luck. First result for Google though. *Sigh
Doresoom
FYI, you can use Google site search to help with that. Try “site:etsy.com brass medallion -horse” in Google.
MM
@ Jonathon
Totally agreed, I do the exact same thing! Tractor Supply and Napa auto are even worse in that regard, their site searches are downright terrible.
@Doresoom
Thanks, and that does help with Etsy but it’s not a perfect solution because it only lets me search by one thing at at time. I might also want to limit my search to US sellers only or a certain price range. I use google site search for Amazon too. I’ve bought several Amana and Whiteside router bits, Trusco and Bessey clamps, Fisch drill bits, Mixol pigment, etc, that won’t reliably show up even if you know the exact name or part number but google finds easily.
Tim B.
That’s been my workaround for the most part, too. Works fairly well on Amazon… which is one of the worst offenders with their internal search functionality, in my opinion.
MM
AI nonsense is definitely getting worse. I’ve noticed it creeping into places it really shouldn’t be. Yesterday I was looking up insect pictures on Google Images and I started noticing that some of the search results were not real species but were realistic looking AI images. Some were obviously not real, but others easily could have been and it took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at. That is extremely concerning, and it’s the same problem with AI answering questions: It’s one thing when we notice an AI-generated answer is obviously wrong and we know not to trust it. We laugh it off as a funny screwup. But what happens when the AI goofs up and we don’t realize it? This is especially worrying because we tend to look to AI for answers AI specifically when we don’t fully something, so it can easily result in the blind leading the blind. There have already been instances when lawyers used AI to help prepare documents for court and the AI fabricated nonsense out of thin air, citing case law that didn’t exist. How long until that happens, it doesn’t get caught, and someone goes to prison because of it? How long until that happens with a medical test? A critical engineering calculation? The control system for a dangerous industrial process or military system?
Aram
Well, I mean, one partial solution is to simply avoid social media — it looks like all of the braindead ads you’re mentioning come from social media?
Easier said than done, perhaps, but it’s a solution that works.
…doesn’t address your larger point, mind, but it’s certainly a good first step. As long as it’s profitable to push crap, they’ll keep pushing crap, so the easiest way out is to remove the profit by removing their apps.
Stuart
It’s not just social media, it’s ALL media – websites, YouTube, and social media.
With websites, a lot of people don’t search anymore. A majority of content consumption is *passive* rather than *active*.
It’s similar on YouTube.
You don’t see what your favorite content creators are doing unless you seek them out. Many people will instead start with the homepage, with algorithmic recommendations, and then spiral from there.
The same with social media – most people simply scroll through their “feed.”
Content creators of all sizes have shifted over towards targeting algorithms to land in your feed.
Some use dirty tricks, such as dynamic headlines where content not updated in 3 years will all of a sudden be “fresh” simply because the year has been changed to 2026.
EBT
Ah, I have noticed Dirty Thumbnail tricks on youtube! A channel I sub too, I watched their video released that day. A few days later in my channel guide, I noticed the same video, same date, has different thumbnail. All use the bold yellow “look here!” font and some tweaked image that is meant to “grab your attention”. Its borderline sensationalism – false advertising. The image distorts the truth of the video, the title is attention but misleading.
A recovery video of a company that has a truck shown, teetering on a cliff, “Oh no! It almost lost it off a cliff!”. Gets click/view/ad revenue.
Stuart
The other problem is that if you *don’t* do that, the algorithm gives you less reach and fewer views. “Following” an account means almost nothing anymore.
On Facebook, channels can’t even reach their followers – Facebook makes you pay for that.
Aram
There was at one point a Chrome add-in that specifically nuked the creator-chosen thumbnail for all videos, and replaced it with a shot of the actual first scene.
It was mildly blissful — being able to scroll through pages of videos without once seeing “The YouTube Surprised/Stunned Face” and bright yellow text.
…I should go see if that’s still maintained; I think my copy got nuked by that Chrome update that changed the rules on packaging add-ins.
Doresoom
YouTube has a built-in split testing feature now for thumbnails and titles. So it may not be that the creator is swapping thumbnails to try to get you to watch again, you may have just gotten both the A and B thumbnails.
That being said, whenever I use the split test feature I always make sure my thumbnails aren’t misleading and actually represent the video content.
Robert
Every eco-system needs energy to power it. What is powering all the ills Stuart and the commenters are mentioning? Seems to me to be advertising. So to me the big question is why do advertisers fund it all? I assume because they believe advertising controls consumer behavior. I try hard not to let it control mine. I could care less what an advertisement says, it’s not objective. It may make me aware of a brand; but for small and medium purchases I go by store brands anyway (a lot of Kirkland), and for large purchases I go by objective reviews like Stuart’s and CR and friends recommendations.
But is the critical mass of consumers so busy and lacking critical thinking that advertising works?
HmmmDusty
If you look at newspaper ads from the turn of previous-previous century, it’s eerily similar to the garbage ads of today online about boner pills, mystery fruits and groundbreaking scientific inventions from local middle schoolers. It’s all snake oil designed to part the gullible with their money. And it works as well now as it did then. People in general, on average have a few easy exploits, and outside of making it illegal to use those, there is not much of a solution.
Stuart
Right, but the newspapers themselves are doing that now.
3 years ago major newspaper and media channels were shilling a “MagLight” product that clearly infringed upon Maglite’s name and logo stylization.
https://toolguyd.com/overpriced-mini-maglight-led-light-not-maglite/
Now, apparently some have moved onto supplements, no-name tools, and Milwaukee tools on Amazon and Walmart (which aren’t authorized platforms).
Bonnie
All these companies thrive on our attention, so we need to stop giving them that.
The only current solution to this problem of the internet is to just stop using large swaths of it. Stop going to anything with a “feed”, and abandon social media. Give up on terrible companies like Amazon. We’ve kind of come full circle back to the old internet of a bunch of isolated communities and random blogs. Except instead of the vast nothingness between them, it’s a vast somethingness. Silence replaced with screaming.
Though I honestly don’t know how that would be an option for your business Stuart, as so many companies have abandoned traditional PR in favor of direct-to-consumer dung flinging.
KMR
“How is it that the internet is less useful today than it was 10 and 20 years ago?”
Stuart, you have a PhD. Surely you know what changed?
The early internet was largely an academic frontier during those formative years for the web in the 1990s and very early 2000s. This was when the internet was great! You couldn’t saturate webpages with loads of graphic bloat and scripts because the only people with high speed internet access were those on college campuses. Information was displayed densely and usually well organized, because most people publishing at the time worked in or were students in colleges and universities. Everyone else, even businesses, had dialup. Even when DSL and cable internet became available, they were costly. 256kbps was like $120/mo. PCs still were $1000+. The majority of people didn’t have cell phones, and mass market cell phones that could browse the internet did not exist.
What happened? Barriers to entry were reduced or eliminated. Technology became cheaper, everyone could gain access. Most people don’t contribute knowledge to the world. They just want to play Candy Crush or that farming sim game. The average person is a consumer, not a producer.
The internet was best in those mid-90s to early 2000s because it was for people like you, and I suspect many people here, we’re makers, we’re doers, we create… that is why we still _read_ a longish format blog post. Sure we consume too, but not mindlessly. We do it with consideration and intention. The average person is looking for the easiest option to be fed to them. Reading is work, where is the TikTok video? That’s why my sister-in-law would just put a tablet in my niece and nephew’s hands from 18 months on. Child care via streaming, no effort, no thinking, no consideration for the future consequences of this behavior. The creation of a captive consumer.
… and I’ll stop there, because lunch is over and I don’t want to get banned.
Stuart
I feel like there used to be a lot more content.
Consider tool storage products. I looked into a couple of brands. I know little about Homak. Where are the reviews? I found an unboxing video, maybe another “here’s what I got” video, and that was it. Is no one buying this brand?
Everyone has a camera and keyboard in their pocket. So where’s the content?
There are a million videos about 3D printed Gridfinity tool and part organizer products. But I can’t tell you the last time I saw something unique and shop-made.
Bonnie
There used to be more concentrated content, but I don’t think there was more of it in total. If anything we’re drowning under too much content which makes it impossible to find. If say three people had some random reviews of their Homak tool chests on their tumblr… Would that be uncovered, even with a google search? Compared to the trillions of posts about General, Craftsman, even old Kennedy stacks?
Also, just judging from their website, they look like a brandname held by a private equity firm that owns a bunch of gun safe makers and sells on finance to auto parts stores. Not the kinda model that tends to generate a lot of social media presence even back in the day.
25 years ago a small or specialty tool brand probably wouldn’t be getting coverage in the main tool mags either. You’d maybe see an add or review in a specialized trade magazine. I don’t know what that industry even looks like today, though it looks like ShopOwner is now digital-only.
The unique and shop-made stuff doesn’t get picked up by aggregating filters. But go hang out on some woodworking or machinist forums or look for shop tours and you’ll find plenty of people with novel solutions.
Nathan
Wow. So darkly dismal of a theme and it’s barely the second week of 26
So now for something completely different?
At not yet 50 I started using the Internet in the early for in grade school. Modem noises and all. And while it’s evolved and changed a lot. You do have to also change to accommodate. Or else I’d be asking you all about you flawed Boolean search’s. Which I gave up on around a decade ago wasn’t that necessary.
Makes me wonder I have decent luck with Gemini and Claude. Hate chatgpt and I can still simple search but I do agree you can’t be just broad brushing it. And yes know there are sites sources to straight avoid. That a bit of a hard part. You can do that with Gemini too say avoid all social media as an example. Be specific where you can.
It’s not all bad but the rot was there in a decade ago. It’s not new and sadly companies trying to figure out the new tool are mucking it up too. It’s cyclical
Stuart
I figured I’d get it out of my system.
HmmmDusty
Allowing every voice online to become an ad-driven vuvuzela was the mistake that is killing internet. It’s nothing but noise with its only goal being to capture your attention.
HmmmDusty
To draw a parallel, if internet used to be like a library, it has now become more akin to a casino blaring light ane noise with only goal being to get you to spend money.
Nathan
I’d buy that as long as there is a nod to even in the library there was things that werent reference material and only the brave ventured in the corner of the stacks. Or rather remember the library on your college campus
PB
There is a lot more noise than there used to be. However, I would disagree about it being less useful now. Even if you were to say the % of useful vs not has gone down, I would still disagree. Because there are truly new and useful things coming out that never existed.
What people have been making videos of on Youtube. And I’m not talking about Youtube the site. But the posters. There is so much more info in the last ten years than there used to be.
Reddit as well. And even news I think has gotten better due to there being more voices.
But of course you have to put in the effort and use critical thinking. You have to become smarter and more efficient at rejecting the noise.
There has always been Snake-Oil salesmen. This post got me thinking about this and so I wanted to know when that term came about. What an interesting story about a guy who didn’t actually sell any snake oil but his concoction may have actually helped due to an ingredient (it may have also not helped due to another). Also, turns out that real snake oil may have actually had some Omega-3 benefits.
But Charlatan nonetheless, they have been around since the dawn of the humans.
blocky
I left off all social media about 10 months ago. I was having burnout from overwork, but also executive function issues and depression which I believe were related to a low dopamine baseline. Using social media in my only downtime was obliterating what motivation I had to spare.
I can’t say I bounced right back, but I will say, I’m glad to have a personal buffer from the AI onslaught.
The increased noise to signal is very demanding of meatbag intelligence and seems to me a continuation of the outsourcing of labor onto the consumer. It’s adversarial, and certainly more about controlling a captive consumer base than driving broad innovation or improving the conditions of our lives.
Stuart
I can’t do that.
I barely post to social media, but some brands gave up on press communications and others never had it.
Nathan
Fair you are in a unique business position to navigate both waters.
A few big things I think more should do
1 monitor your privacy closely. No site info is worth you giving away your information. Paywall is one thing but sign over your email and location is just as bad
2 monitor your network safety and specifically how DNS requests out of your devices are handled.
3 use ad blockers whenever you can. And check their ability and credibility
Oarman
Just get to the point where you recognize clickbait and completely ignore it. “This Milwaukee tool is at incredible price” you know what, if it’s that good I’ll see it on slickdeals or a real ad. “This thing is getting recalled” if it’s important it’ll be real news or I’ll get a letter. Etc. Just don’t click on that crud, nuke it with adblock if you have to, and if a website is just full of it, find better websites. If the clicks go away, the revenue goes away, and the dumb ads go away. Recognizing and actively rejecting advertising is the Gen X superpower.
I’m not sure what the timeline with Gearwrench looks like but it got to the point where I couldn’t find any Taiwanese product, everything was coming from mainland China. That basically evaporated any reason for me to even look at it. Crescent seems to have held on a bit better.
zchris87v
What really irks me is I can search, in quotes, for an exact phrase on google, and no results are found. But if I search forthe page I recall it coming from (via site: search, it appears, oftentimes when I omit part of the phrase. Google went from being a fairly useful search tool (as stated, if you know what you’re looking for) to trying so much to predict what we want to search for, that we can’t search for that one specific thing.
That, and the fact it assumes I need to buy whatever item it is with one click shopping, instead of specific technical details about that item. Replacement parts (or perhaps drawings to machine a part) for an old Wilton vise? Nah, just buy this new cheaply-made one off Amazon from a sketchy third party.
Scott K
Your comment about the number of posts that are essentially asking others to Google is both frustrating and so prevalent. You used to be able to find useful info (not covered in details or specs sections) about products by skimming Home Depot’s Q&A. Now, they’re full of people asking for dimensions, if something will fit in their house, and other things that some are too lazy to figure out on their own. I hadn’t used this feature in a while but looked to hopefully learn more the hardware included in blinds that I couldn’t find listed elsewhere and immediately realized why I stayed away.
Stuart
I found the number of repeated answers in Q&A sections appalling.
When I get a question in the comments, I consider whether the answer should be in the post itself, and I will then answer the question and then update the post.
When I see repeated Q&As on HD or elsewhere, it’s either HD’s fault for not updating the listing, the customers’ fault for not realizing their question had already been answered, or both.
I learned a long time ago that if one person has a question, others are likely to be wondering about the same but just might not be raising their hand.
Scott K
Oh the repeated questions are maddening – I think this is likely the result of people’s laziness and maybe even HD’s terrible newish item layout. I think you’ve mentioned this formatting change- I do not understand why I need to click a dropdown to view basic item info. I find myself scrolling past this often.
Aram
I honestly believe some of the repeated-questions-or-comments are the consequence of “engagement” systems — places like HD often send “what did you think about the item you just bought???” emails, and I suspect plenty of people don’t realize what their response will be used for…
…hence the number of “reviews” that more or less say the item did, or did not, work for their intended usage without any additional details.
Will
The people pushing the AI technology will say that AI will be the answer to all of the problems caused by AI. Eventually, we won’t be able to use the internet without AI. We won’t have autonomy online, everything will be provided to us by AI. I’m sure it will work out fine.
Stuart
Personally, I think part of all the AI hype is manufactured by corporations to drive up investments.
Consider the “metaverse” and all that stuff that never materialized.
Microsoft put Copilot in Notepad. Gemini and others are everywhere.
It all seem wildly responsive rather than strategic.
From a content creator perspective, they take and take and give nothing back. I’ve caught Google stealing my images and not giving a link or credit of any kind.
None of the AI scraping bots seem to respect “don’t scrape my stuff” settings.
Artists are particularly angry over AI being trained on their creativity and content.
Things are going to run into a wall at some point.
Anyway, once it becomes clear no one uses Copilot and other AIs in ways that will generate profits, everyone’s going to take a step back and move onto the next investment craze.
Or maybe toothbrushes with AI are the tip of the iceberg.
MM
I find the AI Art debate to be a complicated issue. On the one hand, I can understand how artists, musicians, voice actors, and so on aren’t happy with their work being used to train AIs or with the prospect that one day AI might take over their jobs. I get that. But the strange thing is that this attitude often seems hypocritically limited as many of those same people complaining about AI are perfectly happy to let technology displace skilled craftspeople elsewhere in their lives. They whine about an AI painting being soulless and taking away their livehood, but meanwhile they are happy to buy Ikea furniture and off-the-rack shoes, for example. Apparently it’s wrong to put artists out of work to consume AI art, but it’s totally okay to put furniture craftsmen and shoemakers out of work and to buy soulless factory slop versions of those products because……well, I don’t really know why. But I see this attitude a lot, and it’s confusing.
MtnRanch
And how much of this problem is the result of a generation of people who were never taught any critical thinking skills in public school?
The victims of this revolution in “education” have become too ignorant to be able to appreciate what they’ve missed out on. Instead, they hitch their future to the new Artificial Idiocy revolution.
It’s long been said that the beauty of computers is that they make it easier to make bigger mistakes much faster. Artificial Intelligence makes it easier to survive ignorance and laziness.
John804
Very little.
Kids get plenty of instruction on critical thinking and making good choices. The problem is others making it so easy to avoid critical thinking that the skill atrophies or is never developed outside of the classroom. AI is just making it worse.
S
Most of my teenage years were being lied to by magazines.
Hot rod in particular was one of the worst. “Build this cool project for only $100!!!”
Step 1. ” Using your $11,000 welder…”
Step 2. ” Now grab your $4,000 plasma cutter…”
Step 3. ” With the $6,000 overhead crane…”
Their simplest projects were never under $40k in specialty tools they just expected everyone to randomly have available in their gigantic barn of a shop…
Let me tell you, if I had a $300,000 barn with $40,000 in tools, I don’t need a $6 magazine for ideas.
This new stuff is no different. They’ve just gotten more efficient at jamming it in front of us.
In the great words of puddin’s fab shop,
” Sittin’ on your butt won’t get your projects done!”. Take the time to stop paying attention to it, and it gets far less irritating.
Tim+E.
So many bad aspects to this, it’s like how many layers of bad attention-grabbing and forced-audience-retention behavior can we stack to maximize people visiting and the number of ads they scroll past. You get like an article, “Huge nationwide pizza chain declares bankruptcy, stores closing immediately”.
1. Attention grabbing headline
2. Sense of urgency (closing immediately)
3. Sense of applicability (nationwide chain)
Then in the article, the first half dozen paragraphs are about not-the-headline, like this other chain was having difficulties or this other restaurant had declared bankruptcy or that times are tight and things are expensive and “that’s taking a toll on the industry”.
1. Keeps you on the site scrolling to find the actual information (what chain actually declared bankruptcy and/or is closing)
2. Seemingly 2-3 full screen ads and many more banners and inlines to scroll through before actual content (making money and ads get tracking on you being interested in pizza presumably)
3. Once you scroll a little, you’re invested in scrolling to get to the actual information (behavior manipulation / forced time and “engagement”)
Then you get down to the actual content, and it’s some 3-4 location “chain” “known nationwide” but only in a couple cities somewhere that is (or isn’t) declaring bankruptcy and closing a single location to restructure.
Or my other favorite because somehow the algorithms decided I like Disney parks, “Popular ride closing indefinitely at Disneyland, unknown if or when it will return” and it’s actually about a roller coaster being down for an hour for a mechanical issue or something and that it should reopen later in the day, they just don’t know when. Anything for clicks.
Amos Dudley
This trend is in fact precisely why your blog continues to be valuable to me.
Jordan
There’s a core problem that’s being skirted around.
We don’t have content, just regurgitation. At some point, there’s nothing left to be regurgitated! This could be representative of just AI, but we’ve also seen it over the last 20+ years in the online news industry –> so many news outlets have downsized or outright closed.
Local news buys their broadcast stories from large content producers. The quality of actual local news is disgustingly poor — it’s obvious that one person is handling the interviewing, filming, and writing all at the same time. Or you find out about things days after it happens (“nice festival, would’ve been GREAT if they talked about it before it closed!”). Swapping out a helicopter for a drone….and then not even using the drone.
The core problem? It costs money to create good content. News, how-tos, Q&As, assembly guides, documentation, etc. And everyone wants that content for free. Sadly, “free” doesn’t keep the lights on or puts food on the table. And advertising/sponsorship budgets are shrinking….or getting filled with exclusions so obnoxious that anyone who partakes is guilty of losing all objectivity or independence.
Factor in a general population with an ever-lowering IQ/reading comprehension/attention span (classic american-style Anti-Intellectualism)…and it makes creating content that ACTUALLY gets consumed even harder to produce. Certain things can only be dumbed down so far before it’s impossible to explain them….or before they start screaming anti-science political slogans. The news used to inform you of things you didn’t know or understand. When’s the last time it did that for you? Seriously.
MM
You have some great points. Local news companies are in an especially bad spot because print media is largely dead. Very few people buy newspapers anymore, and ad revenue would be down as well. Most people aren’t tuning their TV into the local news either. With so much less revenue coming in, how are they going to pay for good reporting?
Another angle is politics. It feels like legacy media has reverted to the days of Yellow journalism where the focus seems to be more on sensationalism, while running defense for one’s preferred political alignment, than it is to actually investigate facts.
fred
One national TV news anchor – who arguable traces his position back to Edward R, Murrow and Walter Cronkite – has opined that news broadcasting has been too reliant on academics (and presumably experts) for analysis. So, I guess the next time interstellar comet comes to visit he’ll ask a man on the street passing by outside his studio rather than talking to the likes of Niel DeGrasse Tyson.
Jordan
Exactly. But it’s a sign of a larger issue — there is a very real need for specialized documentation & services — stuff that can’t easily be duplicated by non-trained/non-experts.
And at the end of the day, people just don’t want to pay for it. We voted with our wallets, and the market has responded accordingly. And they see we’ll accept that slop in every other aspect of our lives — hence the proliferation of Ayy-Eye.
And we’re not rebelling against it. Not enough at least. So the market responds accordingly.
Farmerguy
It seems to me we quickly reached a point the lines crossed that AI is capable of extracting data from vast datasets and AI generated the critical mass of AI data that makes up the data sets AI draws from. Data centers are now needed to hold the data amount exponentially larger than the source in the real world.
DH
we are getting closer to the 100% of F everyone over for a buck
Jordan
We’ve long been over that line of demarcation for ages now.