The Vogelkop, the spectacle of writing, Google Search and those pesky AI Bots

In this quick update I reflect more on AI and its impact on our writing

The Vogelkop

When was the last time you were stopped in your tracks and seized by a sense of awe? If you are not yet acquainted, I wish to introduce you to the Vogelkop. Its full name is the Vogelkop superb bird-of-paradise (Lophorina niedda).

The Vogelkop - Image by Tim Laman at Peerj.com (ccby4.0)

You don’t get many birds with superb in their name. Native to the world’s second largest island, New Guinea, the Vogelkop is distinguished by a striking black plumage that absorbs 99.95% of light. Birds of paradise are known for the extraordinary courtship dances they undertake to attract the attention of a potential mate. If you have three minutes to spare, I will offer a video at the end of this article, where you can listen to Sir David Attenborough waxing lyrically as a Vogelkop dance unfolds.

The Spectacle of Writing

To win an audience and gain any traction in the online world, writers today often need to perform courtship dances of their own. This need to puff up our feathers may feel unnatural or even distasteful for many of us. But without some sort of promotion our words risk being relegated to the shadows. The thought of competing with AI-fabricated writing may only compound these feelings of unease.

Google Search and AI

In early 2022 when the AI language models were still rough around the edges it was easy for both humans and machines to distinguish between human written and AI generated content. Even Google’s Search algorithms were able to detect machine generated content and flag it as spam, a process that allowed them to filter those pages out of Search results. Today these large language models (LLMS) have evolved to the degree that it is now impossible to distinguish between human writing and AI generated writing. Sometimes you can spot some slight anomalies, such as overly structured content, but even humans write like that occasionally.

To reflect this evolution in AI technologies, Google has recently updated its Search documentation and removed a few significant words from its guidelines. Google Search algorithms have now shifted from showing search results that favor ‘helpful content written by people for people’ to  ‘helpful content created for people’. This minor change of words reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land marks a significant shift in the AI landscape. The AI systems have won.

Substack Writers respond

I am still collating comments from all corners of Substack in response to my recent article ‘The AI bots are coming for your Substack’. The variety of opinions received has certainly been thought provoking and often quite surprising. My next article will present some of the more interesting opinions offered, as well as giving a few thoughts of my own. When faced with an external threat, such as AI systems, it is natural for many to simply respond with fear and rejection, but some writers have surpassed this reflex and provided noteworthy insight.

Please consider subscribing to The System Reboot below to continue this conversation. The words are hand crafted without the assistance of AI.

My own courtship dance

Over the last few days I have been performing a small dance of my own with the Substack team. Their competitors at Medium.com have publicly stated that they will provide a mechanism to allow writers to tell those pesky AI bots not to crawl through their content. I was keen therefore to know whether Substack would follow suit. I tagged around 10 key members of the Substack team into my conversation but was met with a wall of silence. I even left comments with CEO

Chris Best

. Still no response. My persistence slowly started to pay off though. Chris started to like a couple of my comments here and there. Just to let me know that he was aware of me. Perhaps he was busy. Then I looked again at his Substack and saw this.

Maybe he wasn’t so busy after all. He might have just been distracted by airplanes. So I continued bugging him until I finally got a brief answer from him in a private message. I can happily confirm that Substack will be offering writers the option to push away those AI bots. Or as Chris put it quite concisely:

“Re ai: we plan to allow you to block them”

This will of course take some time to implement, but as writers we can rest assured that it is at least in the pipeline. With that good news out of the way, here is the promised mating dance for your viewing pleasure. Have a great day.