DanThornton

Tech, Geekery, Pop Culture, Miscellaneous

Playing to an empty room on the internet

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There’s an article from Guitar World many years ago which has stayed with me all this time. It asked whether readers would be as dedicated to practising, if any chance of playing to a live audience was taken away.

At the time, I practised guitar daily, and could never imagine that would change. But over the years there have been times when I’ve gone weeks or months between picking up an instrument. Part of it was due to work and life commitments, but a larger part was the fact I haven’t been in a band for years.

I’ve never been a skilled or virtuoso guitar player (I’d say I’m workmanlike at best), so being on stage in a group was a massive part of the motivation for me to spend hours on scales, learning new songs and making sure I wouldn’t mess up too badly.

Playing to an empty room on the internet
Playing to an empty room on the internet

At the same time, I’ve written and published some type of article online pretty much every day for 20 years. Much of it was professional work for employers or clients, but alongside that has always been blogging and other side projects.

My personal projects have rarely been set up as focused, profitable business ventures. Generally they’ve been opportunities for me to write about things I care about, and potentially grow an audience and a small income stream over time. And while they’ve never made much money, a surprisingly large number of people have visited them over the years.

But recently, that’s all changed.

Even before the rise of inescapable AI, Google’s regular algorithm updates results in demoting a lot of small sites and blogs. And then came AI overviews and search tools cutting traffic overnight as Google went from organising the world’s information to simply republishing it all themselves without permission or financial compensation.

I don’t think any search engine owes me rankings or traffic, and my advice has always been to diversify where your audience comes from. You should never rely on a third party business being nice enough to publicise you for free, whether that’s a search engine, social network or anywhere else.

But when I’m focused on ensuring client sites have multiple, sustainable sources of business whatever happens, it means I don’t have much time left to spend on my own projects. Especially when they were always primarily about the writing. I grew up loving books, magazines, comics and fanzines, and my sites were the result of wanting to create my own versions.

Putting aside the debates about AI, search engines and whether I could pivot to video, creating NFTs or selling products, I come back to the original question.

Will I still write as much if no-one comes to read it? Or even find it?

The honest answer is that at the moment I don’t know. With client work, there’s still a need for human input to create articles that work for SEO, which still effectively powers AI results. But writing for side projects purely for fun and the possibility that it might pay off financially or otherwise at some point?

It’d be nice to think I’ll keep going no matter what, because of my love of the art of writing. But part of what first attracted me wasn’t the ink on a page – it was the impact that the right words or phrases could have on someone reading them. And I’m still fascinated by how everything from an advertising slogan to a novel can stay with someone for life, inspire them to turn their world upside down, or spend their money on something they never needed until now.

And I know I’m not the only person wondering whether they’ll be writing as much, or at all, in the future. Which raises all kinds of questions about creativity, information, bias and accessibility if all those voices go quiet. Even if it does mean I might have more time to pick up a guitar again…

Image by Jean-Jacques Halans via Unsplash

Crawling out from under an email avalanche

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I’ve experienced some poor health recently which prevented me from working as much as normal, and even having a few full days away from computer and mobile screens. And while I’m now recovering and slowly crawling out from under an email avalanche, it’s made me reconsider a few things.

Crawling out from under an email avalanche: Photo by Yannik Mika on Unsplash
Crawling out from under an email avalanche: Photo by Yannik Mika on Unsplash

The first is that I’ve always been an information junkie. In the ‘old days’ when I discovered a hobby, I’d want to read every magazine available, whether that led to a pile of guitar magazines, or White Dwarf when I discovered Warhammer. And I’ve held onto many of them, despite very few actually being useful in the years since. Alongside a constantly expanding library of books.

In the modern world, that meant spending a lot of time reading blogs, newsletters, and social media. In the past, it would often spark a blog post, article, work project or an idea for the future. But at some point, I started reading much more than actually doing.

The replacement of Twitter by an increasingly useless propaganda machine, and the influx of AI generated posts and replies elsewhere has helped me cut down on social media, whether I wanted to or not. But the stress of seeing my email inboxes overflowing with often generic or irrelevant emails has made me realise I need to perform a similar cull on my subscriptions. The FOMO if I don’t see something, particularly when I’ve worked as a news journalist, has been slowly replaced by the knowledge I’m getting older, time is finite, and my collection of stuff ‘to look at when I have some spare time’ is covered in virtual dust and cobwebs.

In just a week or two, my email accounts can collect hundreds, or even thousands, of emails. And a very small percentage were from clients, or actually contained anything that was entertaining, useful, or actionable.

So it’s time to cull anything I’m not actually getting some value from.

The second is that my stress and frustration at not being able to work was eased by having some great and understanding clients. But not being able to actually create anything for either paid projects or my own sidelines soon became a massive issue.

Despite the best efforts of Generative AI, Google, and other factors, writing and working on new ideas and projects is what brings me joy. Whether that’s blogging here, creating a long and detailed guide for a client, or getting back to contributing to Peterborough STEM Festival.

I’m not the only person wondering how the rise of Gen AI will impact mental health for humanity. Whether that’s AI chatbots, or in my case, finding it harder to justify taking the time to craft something from scratch and reach an audience when it will probably get buried by plagiarised autocomplete-generated cobblers in search results, and demoted by the walled gardens of social media if I dare to link to it. Considering human creativity dates back 45,000 to 64,000 years with cave paintings, the urge to create and share art, stories, music etc isn’t going to disappear from human nature just because someone can replicate it with a couple of lines of prompts. All the talk around AI tends to focus on the output and whether it can match humans in quality, not questioning why we want to replace something that benefits our mental health, thought processes, and understanding of the world with a tool which mainly rewards the same rich tech oligarchs who already exploited the web.

And lastly, I’ve been inspired to think about how I want to spend the next decades of my life, and how to make them as good as possible in terms of both work and personal time. How can I do more of what I enjoy, even if it means finding alternative routes to reach people who still want human content or connections. What can I do to be more proactive in ensuring my health is as good as possible, and spend my time with friends and family more meaningfully. And how to invest my love of researching and discovering new information and knowledge more productively than clearing out hundreds of emails, of which only a small percentage bring me joy, entertainment or worthwhile knowledge.

What happens when we can’t believe anything online?

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It’s always been a good idea to think critically about the information you’re given, or why people might be acting in a certain way. That was true before the digital age, but it’s become more important when you’re interacting with an anonymous person anywhere in the world.

We’ve gone from interacting with people in our village, to receiving news via print, radio and TV, to finding out information from random posts on social networks. With any online publication or community, it takes a little time and effort to figure out who seems to be more interesting or trustworthy, which means most of us will only expend that energy in groups that we’re heavily invested in, if at all.

And humans are psychologically built on making snap judgements at face value. Useful if you’re trying to work out whether that’s a sabretooth tiger about to jump from the bushes, and still handy if you’re being approached in a dark alley. Less helpful when you’re trying to judge the accuracy and honesty of a random internet message.

What happens when we can't believe anything online?
What happens when we can’t believe anything online?

Bad and manipulative people have always existed. But technology has helped them scale. Someone untrustworthy in a small village will struggle to find new targets indefinitely, whereas direct mail scams could reach people across the country or around the world.

And online we’ve seen the growth of automated bots and sock puppet accounts. We all receive an influx of phishing emails and messages to our phones on a regular basis. And even those most informed and aware about security can become victims. The old rule about the police and criminals has been flipped, and now they can fail hundreds of times, but we only need to mess up once to have our bank accounts emptied or identities stolen.

But what happens when we can’t trust anything?

There are a lot of ethical questions about AI, from data sources and algorithm bias, to the accuracy of the output.

But what about the impact on all of us, including many who aren’t interested in artificial intelligence, and have no idea of the current and future capabilities of it? What’s the cost to our minds and energy levels when we have to not only assume that we can’t trust anything, but also that it may never have even been near a human? And when that misinformation or manipulation can be done more effectively, at a greater scale than ever before?

The concept of decision fatigue has been debated, but there is some evidence it can impact your cognitive ability, and even your physical wellbeing. Now imagine having to spend time and energy evaluating every single incoming message, every piece of text, every sound or song you hear, and any video or photograph you see for clues about the origin. Not just asking whether someone is trying to spread misinformation for a political or financial gain, but whether your friend has actually gone on holiday to Barbados, or just used AI to fake it. Or even if your friend is a real person at all.

I’ve worked in and around technology for a long time. And there’s always been a trend that regulation comes long after progress, and tends to ignore most of the impacts on normal people. You can argue pretty successfully that the Industrial Revolution raised living standards in general, but it took decades and centuries for that to make a meaningful difference for the general population, compared to changes to society, the environment, and to the individual wealth of mill owners and factory bosses.

And there’s no reason to believe the AI Revolution is going to be any different. We can’t predict all of the impacts, both positive and negative. But we make an educated guess about where the benefits are likely to land, and the disadvantages are probably going to fall.

Image credit: Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash.