Will Manidis is the CEO of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO
In the age of A/B testing and automated engagement, I have to wonder who is really getting played? The people reading the synthetically generated bullshit or the people who think they’re “getting engagement” on a website full of bots and other automated forms of engagement cultivation.
How much of the content creator experience is itself gamed by the website to trick creators into thinking they’re more talented, popular, and well-received than a human audience would allow and should therefore keep churning out new shit for consumption?
It’s ultimately about ad money. They haven’t cared it’s humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It’s bizarre.
It’s pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.
This reminds me of the ad supported games that advertise other ad supported games. I think I’ve even seen an ad supported game run an ad for itself.
I wonder if at some point people will walk away from these platforms and the platform and its owners won’t even be able to tell.
