Search Engine Obfuscation

Reader Mauro left the following comment on a post from the other day:

It gives me a great prompt for something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while; Search Engine Optimisation, and avoiding Big Tech nonsense, in the year of 2025 and beyond.

Far from being outside the scope of the blog, (which, maybe I’ll address at some point once I’ve figured out the scope of the blog,) how we make our living as writers has always been the focus, and how we interface and overcome the challenges put to us by Big Tech has always been central to the core theme of the blog as well.

Now we’ve got AI-charged Big Tech and one of the major applications of the newest technology seems to be replacing organic writers with the accumulated snark of every Redditor on the planet in one big Lovecraftian horror beyond human comprehension, (but not really,) Mauro poses a very pertinent question.

Let’s break this down into a few pieces.

Should You Trust Big Tech and AI Companies?

The above heading falls under the adage, “If there’s a question in a headline, the answer is almost certainly, ‘no.’”

Big Tech began as a Cold War military operation funded by black market shenanigans, and now it’s a Cold War military operation funded by black market shenanigans and the economic output created by feeding on the attention of billions of people, 24/7, algorithmically throwing  raw materials in the form of twerk-videos at your brain so it can harvest your eyeballs in the form of advertising dollars, and, somewhere, dopey investors who can’t tell a massive bubble from a ball of guaranteed investment returns.

But that’s not the worst of it.

If you’re a writer and you write the bits online, then, not content with getting you addicted to a constant stream of rage-bait and bubble butts, Big Tech have set their algorithms to literally steal your content, regurgitate it for the unwashed masses and, as a result, literally steal money from your pocket.

Case in point, back when I was a young hustler many years back, one of the top results for “How to Start Copywriting” was this little blog.

Now, obviously the blog project has faded in and out of existence, so I can’t blame my lack of results on AI. But collectively, writers can. Check this out:

Here you see how Google’s AI overview is attempting to make it so you don’t only not read my little blog for the best advice on how to be a copywriter – you don’t read anyone’s site on how to be a copywriter at all. Google harvests the data from all the sites, spits it out in its own words, and delivers it to the search user without them ever having to go anywhere else.

It’s ultimately theft, and while “How to be a copywriter,” isn’t exactly the most urgent information on the planet, this tech stuff will lead to people dying as the AI spits out regurgitated nonsense without actually knowing what’s behind it.

In other words; don’t ask it how to save your choking baby sister, because it doesn’t know.

But on our topics; assume anything publicly available online will be regurgitated and used against you.

Crisis and Opportunity: Are You The Cat Or The Mouse?

Search Engine Optimisation still exists, even though those Search Engines are trying to steal everything you work for. I’d recommend the following course of action for dealing with the fact that everything you write publicly will be used against you.

Treat it like a cat and mouse game; you want to write for human beings, and have human beings find you. But you don’t want to give anything away in public for free that can be used later by some algorithmic little monster.

I’ll explain my word choice in a moment, but first, let’s look at another screenshot:

Here’s me straight up asking ChatGPT what it knows about me. I’ve protected the other Jamie McSloy because he’s innocent in all of this. But other than that, this is what it has on me. There are two things to talk about here:

1. ChatGPT is a search engine. This is what it has on me currently, and it’s all based off a LinkedIn profile that I don’t use. It’s not wrong, but there’s obviously scope for improvement. For instance, it doesn’t even point you to my excellent blog; and so we can fiddle around and make sure AI is telling people what we want it to tell (and not what we don’t want it to say.)
2. You can’t escape, but you can play Matador. This tech is in its infancy, and it will get better. When you think about how I’ve hampered/limited my online presence in recent years, it still got me – and from a place I wouldn’t expect. Again, it’s cat and mouse. You can be the mouse or the cat.

Let’s talk about the subject I want to talk about next. Writing for Humans.

Or, What We’re Doing Here

There are several things going on in this article, and I’m not sure where the streams will converge into a mighty river.

Funnily enough, that’s why you’re reading this instead of some AI slop.

Because ultimately, while I’m just a copywriter-turned fiction writer and occasional essayist, I’m a human being with insights, experience and knowledge and I’m sharing it with you. Long suffering readers have my sympathy.

Some of you read because you’re copywriters who want to make money.

Some of you read these posts because I’m at least trying to be some kind of authentic human being exploring life in the way we all do and sharing insight along the way.

Regardless of where you fall in the various camps of readership, what I’m selling/giving away/forcing you to consume with your eyeballs is human insight. I’m doing it with the assumption it’ll be intriguing or useful, but even if it’s a point-and-laugh thing, it’s a human one.

All of us are, ultimately, doing the same, and we all have one thing in common: AI is not doing this and won’t be doing this at any point.

Now…

Let’s not get all teary-eyed hippy about the human condition.

A Guesstimate For The Future Of Human Artworks

I realise I haven’t addressed the crux of Mauro’s question: should we have our own AI systems that are local so we can harvest gold from under the sleeping dragon without compromising our personal information or valuable IP?

Absolutely, yes. But that’s a topic for another day.

(In other words; I’ve once again run a PC of mine ragged and I have a bunch of cool experiments to share once I am running on processing power instead of fumes again.)

Today’s topic leads me to a conclusion for what to do.

You’ll notice that in this article, there’ve been a lot of long-winded, complex metaphors and analogies that a computer system would never come up with. That’s by design, and I’ve spent far too many years trying to develop a writing style that a computer can reproduce.

I’m just a single writer with a hobby-blog side project. I’m not trying to lead a movement here or anything. But I will offer a prediction and a salve for the near future.

Firstly, as AI continues to get better at aggregating and regurgitating content in slightly-novel-but-not-really ways, it’ll occupy the middle-ground more and more. How to write a good CV is probably not the article you want to be writing if you’re just going to offer milquetoast advice like, “Put your best qualifications at the top.”

AI can do that and it’s pretty good. It’s the same with art. If you want a picture of Super Mario fighting Pikachu, AI can do that. It knows who Super Mario is, it knows who Pikachu is, and it can stick them together.

As technology evolves to do a good job of what can be done, artists move into the areas that it can’t do. Years after the advent of camera lenses, most paintings aren’t attempting to compete in photorealism, and mass movements of painting can best be described by, “What am I even looking at?”

The solution then is twofold, (and both will require explaining later, but I’m not a 24/7 machine and my dinner is cooking.)

Firstly, you interface with technology to the extent it allows you to reach other humans, and then you make human-only spaces to share whatever it is you’re sharing.

Secondly, in terms of what to share, you inhabit the areas in which technology doesn’t even know where to look.

I’ll see you in the next one.

P.S. If only I had already launched the Vault, we’d have a human-space outside the reaches of Big Tech Algo Spiders, where we could discuss concepts like these and how to strategically and tactically get real world results.

I should really get to that again.