AI is like the auto tune of certain singers, they are all good at singing, but if you turn it off the real talent comes out

It would be nice if this were true, but it’s not. AI is creating some exceptional, exceptional imagery that surpasses even the creativity of many artists and photographers.This coming from me, a guy who was a Fine Art Major with a minor in art history. What’s frightening is that we are only in the birthing stage of AI. We’re doomed.

I keep seeing non-creatives argue that AI has “levelled the playing field.” But, “If everyone can be a creative, then no one really is.” Just like how, if everyone were rich, no one would actually be rich.

It has no levelled anything. And photography is unaffected by AI, unless you make your living from selling generic stock photos or something. Non-artistic person still can't take great pictures and I have not even once considered altering my images with AI. I am actually buying more photography gear and getting deeper into it.

A great photo is still a great photo. I am very proud of my best photos, they are combination of my "eye" for seeing beauty in things and shapes and composition and the environment through which I navigate and spot this beauty. Nowhere does AI come into play. Maybe for some mechanistic processing like noise reduction or upsampling.

@gatormark I didn't say that he can't do one thing well, but I said something else. With art, including photography, what you want if you know how to do things comes out, what your mind imagines, with artificial intelligence comes out what comes out of the prompt provided and from an identical prompt different images can always come out. Let's then assume that the photographer has to do a photo shoot and what does he do in this case? If you have to take photos the way the client wants and you won't come out with anything good because you don't have the skills

Just talked to a G rep regarding the shocking adwords conversation we're experiencing lately. I asked her to pass my feedback to the adwords team.

And than it hit me, they are probebly using now the AI to show the ads and send in clicks based on what the AI thinks might be the user intent, not what we actually (key phrases specifically) specified.

Conversations are almost non existent since they've started rolling this core update, but the number of clicks is up. Mostly one page zombies that do not interact with the site or buy anything, accidental clicks.

What a mess.

@goodoldweb "what a mess" describes it very well. I took a close look at the shop yesterday and according to the data from the Merchant Center, there was a sharp decline in both free and paid ads on March 20. Conversion rates have been at 0 for three days now, but traffic itself has increased. Google's damn AI craze is destroying livelihoods at an ever-faster rate. You really have to be an idiot not to realize that you're also killing your own customers.

As this update finished we saw a sharp drop in traffic again. So we are down -70% from preupdate traffic and it looks like it stays this way.
Search rssults from google are complete rubbish in our niche.
One good thing about the update is, that amazon picked up the sales bei 250%. Bad for users as they now have to pay the additional amazon fee.

Anyone noticed that whatever traffic they send to some of us is full of angry and definitely not web experienced people?

How personalisation and elitism work hand in hand ?

@goodoldweb "what a mess" describes it very well. I took a close look at the shop yesterday and according to the data from the Merchant Center, there was a sharp decline in both free and paid ads on March 20. Conversion rates have been at 0 for three days now, but traffic itself has increased. Google's damn AI craze is destroying livelihoods at an ever-faster rate. You really have to be an idiot not to realize that you're also killing your own customers.

After talking 15 minuts to the G rep i feel that G "being an Idiot" with this update is an understatement. They are really cluless. I gave up eventually and just asked her to pass my feedback to the team.

Maybe try asking them to call you too and give them some feedback. The more people call to complain the better.

I mentioned to her we're considering transfering our campaigns to Bing and Facebook if this junk traffic continues.

I was fobbed off. Ever since I chewed out the consultant last time, they don't like me anymore. ;)

If you have to take photos the way the client wants and you won't come out with anything good because you don't have the skills

@convo

This was going to be my next comment. Certain types of photography will always have a place. For instance, wedding photography. However, I can see even things such as product photography being replaced by AI ( I used to art direct). I can see even portrait photography being replaced by AI.

This week, my traffic has decreased every single day. I wonder where the bottom is, if there is a bottom. Next week should be much worse since spring break begins in many places. This old guy has to start looking for a job again. What a crazy world we live in.

2 days full of zombies

Certain types of photography will always have a place. For instance, wedding photography. However, I can see even things such as product photography being replaced by AI ( I used to art direct). I can see even portrait photography being replaced by AI.

It's already widespread. I attended a panel discussion about this recently and I was shocked how good the photos and the video were. It was a former photographer that switched to using AI and he shot mostly food. The images and video would have taken a huge amount of effort to produce using a camera and props. You literally could not tell it wasn't real. This is already here and it's going to wipe out a lot of production for tv commercials, print ads, online ads, still life photography, product photography and modeling. Why pay models, actors, and agency royalties if you can just cook up the talent in AI? These only ones left will be celebrities that people will be willing to pay for brand endorsement and who can sue over infringements of the likeness.

Fine art is still holding up as gen ai cannot produce huge images yet and customers want a name and reputation behind the artist, but it's creeping in everywhere and artists are coopting AI tools quickly to get ahead of the curve.

As for the legal, financial, medical, and other professions AI is going to tear through them and get rid of a lot of lower level jobs. Banks won't have hardly any employees...paralegals won't be needed as much. Those docs in India reading your x-rays? Replaced soon enough.

As this update finished we saw a sharp drop in traffic again.

So far, we're doing okay. We had a fairly strong improvement in the November Core Update, and a year-over-year comparison suggests that--for us--this March Core Update produced modest gains.

We're still way down from 2022 and 2023, but it's hard to know how much of our slippage over the past couple of years has been from Google updates and how much is the result of AI overviews, "people also ask," stacked YouTube thumbnails, and other distractions from organic Web search results.

I do think the Web is too important a resource to shrivel up and die, but Google doesn't seem to be doing much to keep it alive these days.

As this update finished we saw a sharp drop in traffic again.

I always seem to have drops continue past the updates...traffic has been dropping steadily since around February 12th so the update isn't the only cause. I think people are pulling in spending hard due to all the chaos caused by this band of nutters in DC.

Good article on the topic.

The World's Largest Search Engine Doesn't Want You to Search
[honest-broker.com...]

My main project is an international directory + 40 local directories in the same niche. The main, large directory was doing 4000 visits a day up until December, when it was crushed down to 200 a day. The 50 small sites which had been penalised for thin content back in March 2024, recovered, (thin content had been removed 3 months before).

The difference was scaled AI content. The big site had it. The small ones did not. So, I added scaled AI content to 5 of the local directories. Initially, traffic doubled quickly as the content was richer and covered more keywords, but then the hammer was dropped, and the 5 sites tanked. Objectively, they were better with the AI content, which provided a two-sentence summary of the business. But apparently, not according to Google. I believe it was an 'unedited AI content' penalty. The content was good, and not repetitive. My prompts to write the content, was 3 pages long with lots of checks to ensure no repetition of language or even writing style. No fluffy irrelevant words. Just useful, very descriptive, accurate business summaries.

So I removed the AI content from them and my large site, and today, three weeks after the fix, they are back at December traffic levels—perhaps slightly higher, as other sites doing similar things are still dead in the water.

I am annoyed by this. Oh, I'm happy with the recovery.... but my sites are objectively by any measure, no longer as good, as I've had to lower the user experience to rank. This goes against all principles of SEO that I have followed in the last 20 years, that if you make the best site, it will be resilient to Google algorithm changes.

@richinberlin It may also be that the AI content is not the culprit. Just the other day the GOOGLE update ended and the cause of the recovery could be this. It must be said, however, that it has now become impossible to understand whether a change made is good or bad. It's no longer worth wasting time, you might as well go to the casino to try your luck

What the heck is going on now? The update is over and on the same day: Discover traffic is back. Increase in visitors to the news page by 280%...
Shop: Yesterday at 5 p.m., orders suddenly started coming in. Result: Best day in weeks; we almost reached our target monthly turnover (previously we were still 48% away from it).

I give up, there really is no logic to be seen here.

@Micha Keep us updated on how things are going

@conro i can tell you now: just one more day, then it will be business as usual. Traffic and sales will drop back to a minimum ...

@Micha It would be nice to hear you say the opposite

@richinberlin Yet Google can plaster unedited AI content on practically every web search page and have the audacity to penalize us for using a relevant useful sentence or 2 on our page(s). Greedy Hypocrites.

@Goodoldweb, thanks for that article link, that was a really good read!
It's clear that the google club is living inside their own bubble and are prone to their self created tunnel vision as they have no clue of what is happening outside.
They are headed towards the edge of the cliff and I see no sign of any rescue.......they should take Boeing as an example to see what happens if you take the wrong decisions regarding your business operations.

when google will have just 30-50 percent of market and when AI will not be part of "search" all things will be automatic ok, if that will be ever?

@Conro, no it's 100% an AI issue. 50 sites A/B tested. Even 2 sentences of unedited AI text, is being penalised as auto scaling. It's designed to catch people making websites out of data (think celebrity pages, where you can auto-create a whole written page using data you can find, age, number of movies, birthday, most successful movie, partner etc

Seriously. My NON AI sites in the A/B test have cracked on, whilst the useful, brief, unedited sites with AI content have all been crushed.

My main site which went from down by 95% in December, which i removed the scaled AI content from, has totally recovered. I say totally as its down, as its got less content, and less keywords, but on the content it has, its recovered 100%

photography is unaffected by AI, unless you make your living from selling generic stock photos or something.

AI has affected photographers who showcase their creative capabilities online and watermark their photos. There are plenty of videos out there [youtu.be...] training people how to remove watermarks with Gemini. There also are new sites popping up online featuring easy drag & drop AI watermark removal features. It probably won't be long before AI can scrape an entire site, spin the content and remove the watermarks of all images in just seconds to create competing websites that siphon off traffic from the original sites.

Even 2 sentences of unedited AI text, is being penalised as auto scaling.

I wonder how many sites are destroyed due to false alarms in their "AI detector" ...

@Dooku

Good article indeed. What a sad state of affairs.

We now add "Find us on DuckDuckGo or Bing" at the bottom of all comunication with customers.

I've been warning about Google since their release of the Spybar (2006?). "Tin hat foil" and "conspiracy theorists" they called us.

I see an argument circulating on social media that U.S. tech bros should be exempt from global IP theft to protect us from China. If that's true, could the West simply hire two individuals working out of a basement to track down these Chinese companies online, add them to a Western IP blacklist, and launch DOS attacks to keep them offline?

If a Chinese company were to create a Studio Ghibli-inspired image generator or something similar, how significant would that threat really be? Does U.S. tech bros doing it first improve our security against China?

If DeepSeek was trained by ChatGPT and we don't want the Chinese to obtain these tools because of national security concerns, should they be in the public domain, online and and training Chinese systems?

Couldn’t the West secure exclusive rights to use global IP data strictly for in-house national defense—and even for in-house meme generation—without exposing these tools to the public? Do we really need to monetize this technology in the public domain and use it to compete with or even undermine creatives? Is that part of the protection plan we need against China?

Is outsourcing the world's manufacturing to China and enriching them to build and buy arms a bigger risk than them simply generating another content spinner already out there?

Will these proprietary text and image spinners held by tech bros in the USA really safeguard our sovereign borders from China? If so, how? To me, it appears to be a very thin argument for yet another massive transfer of wealth and assets to an already insanely rich group—nothing more.