AI DESTROYS SEARCH RESULTS, GOOGLE FIRES WORKERS IN CHARGE OF IMPROVING IT
Enshittification
Amid a massive wave of tech company layoffs in favor of AI, Google is firing thousands of contractors tasked with making its namesake search engine work better.
As Vice reports, news of the company ending its contract with Appen — a data training firm that employs thousands of poorly paid gig workers in developing countries to maintain, among other things, Google’s search algorithm — coincidentally comes a week after a new study found that the quality of its search engine’s results has indeed gotten much worse in recent years.
Back in late 2022, journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to refer to the demonstrable worsening of all manner of online tools, which he said was by design as tech giants seek to extract more and more money out of their user bases. Google Search was chief among the writer’s examples of the enshittification effect in a Wired article published last January, and as the new study out of Germany found, that effect can be measured.
With CEOs’ short-sighted AI gold rush claiming ever more jobs, the termination of the Appen contract is particularly harsh not only because of how crappy Google Search has gotten but also because of how crappy things were and are for people who work for the Australia-based AI training firm.
Hunger Games
In a shocking exposé published last October, Wired revealed that people who attempt to make ends meet by doing gig work for Appen often make as little as two cents per training task, often netting only a dollar or two per day when work was slow. As one young man in Pakistan put it, working for the company was tantamount to “digital slavery.”
As the union presenting workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, stated in a press release earlier this week, the contract termination will impact at least 2,000 workers, or perhaps more given that “contracts with Google account for roughly one-third of Appen’s business revenues.”
While Google rushes to pour billions of dollars into AI, it also, as the Alphabet union points out, chose to terminate the Appen contract without any severance benefits, much less “transparency or accountability” about how or why the decision was made.
“This news should be a wake-up call for workers in the tech industry and anyone concerned about the impacts of AI on working people,” Toni Allen, the union’s executive board secretary, said in the statement. “As subcontractors for Google, we have been a canary in the AI coal mine calling out the precarious labor conditions we face being the human workers standing between large language models and their end users.”
“This is what AI work looks like when workers have no say in the process,” Allen continued. “It is time that the world heard our voices before this situation repeats itself far and wide.”
AI Garbage Is Destroying Google Results
Google Search has been caught up in a massive tidal wave of generative AI garbage.
It’s starting to look like an unrecognizable heap of spam, meaningless search engine optimization (SEO) filler, and dubiously sourced news.
“It’s the worst quality results on Google I’ve seen in my 14-year career,” eminent SEO expert Lily Ray told Fortune.
Instead of filtering out scams, Google is seemingly bowing to the pressure and is instead promoting them.
“Right now, it feels like the scammers are winning,” Ray added
Researchers recently confirmed these suspicions, finding that Google is consistently ranking ad-filled spam. In a year-long study, first reported on by 404 Media, a team of German researchers studied search results for thousands of product-review terms and found some shocking results.
The team found an “inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns.”
In other words, the “search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,” the team concluded in their paper.
And, as you might expect at this point, generative AI is likely playing a central role in the dissemination of this low-quality content.
“The line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry — a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI,” the researchers write.
Despite seeing some improvement in results since the start of their experiment in terms of affiliate spam, the team still observed a “downwards trend in text quality,” leaving “quite a lot of room for improvement.”
There’s plenty of evidence that supports the theory that generative AI is slowly ruining the internet.
With the democratization of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, content farms are pumping out vast amounts of badly researched and often entirely unedited content.
Even once respected publications are being caught using generative AI tools — and often with less-than-stellar results, like at BuzzFeed, CNET, and Sports Illustrated.
And the technology’s mutually beneficial relationship with SEO, the practice of tweaking content to increase its discoverability and have it rank higher on search results, is seemingly compounding Google’s woes.
That desn’t bode well, considering AI’s tenuous connection to reality and inability to tell the truth.
Google’s own forays into AI-powered search leaves much to be desired. Its Search Generative Experience, which was released in beta form last year, has trouble answering simple prompts like naming “countries in Africa that start with the letter k” and sometimes gives out wildly inaccurate information.
In short, there’s a good reason why users are “sharing their observation that search engines are becoming less and less capable of finding genuine and useful content satisfying their information needs,” as the German researchers noted in their paper.
The “enshittification” and “junkification” of the internet are real — and generative AI is in big part to blame.
