I watched a podcast last night (here) about the internet and how automation is creating MORE traffic (and content) than human beings. Right across the internet there are more bots spewing out text, images and video than actual people. They’re creating content, adding comments and then arguing amongst themselves and a lot of humans are blissfully unaware.

This is something I’ve certainly noticed as virtually every day I seem to see (in my feed or searches) a Facebook post that is AI (LLM) written and automatically posted. Like this one I wrote about a couple of days ago.

I’m not sure, btw, whether Facebook has a worse infection than other platforms or whether they are just getting pushed further up the algorithm (for me).

These automated accounts:

• trawl genuine sites and posts for a topic that “it” thinks will generate clicks and engagement
• writes some flowery nonsense that usually very much misinterprets that was said (or actually happened)
• frequently (in Jimmy’s case, but also other comedians) adds an image with what is supposedly a quote from him – but is clearly not

If this were just the case (and they are very misleading) it would be bad enough – but what then happens is that these posts feed back into the AI slop soup – and there you have a perfect sh*t storm. Bots talking nonsense then being referenced by other bots…taking us down into the 7^th circle of information hell.

On to my second point. I was working yesterday on disproving another AI piece of nonsense about Jimmy supposedly making a second 2008 GMTV appearance (he didn’t) when a search brought up the below.

I never take any notice of Google’s AI overview panel – that’s just in my screenshot to show what my VERY SPECIFIC search terms had retrieved.

The thing that caught my eye was bottom right – this blog is being cited.

On the one hand the 2008 BFQ has zero relevance…so null points for that. I hate that they are designed to always find something / always be right and so just vomit out ANYTHING that could be remotely related.

But the bigger concern is where this all leads, relating to the above.

My impetus for creating this blog, after many years of amassing comedy information and books, was to push back on the rubbish (that I’d started seeing online) by pushing real and verified facts out into the ether.

It was bad enough a couple of years ago when humans were picking up poor data from AI overviews and regurgitating it as gospel. Now it’s getting worse week on week.

The issue I can see, in the not too distant future, is that the various AIs are sucking up my posts and will regurgitate them as their own text. That was kind of my initial aim anyway (feeding them some truth) but many people will just read the automated overview and not click through to here.

Nothing on here is monetised so, in a way, that doesn’t matter (although it’s nice to know I’m not whispering into the abyss).

Its more a concern as to HOW it will word what it finds. Will it add its own “opinion”? Will it suck in comments from Reddit, X, Facebook etc. and add a different slant to what I initially said?

I’ll stop ranting now.

Just be assured that everything in this blog is 100% from a human.

Or…

Am I a human identifying as a bot?