An Irresponsible AI Application

Why relying upon Gemini is a bad idea

While we are obvious enthusiasts of artificial intelligence technology in general, and are advocates of its use in a wide variety of creative applications, we are not blind to the possibility - or rather, the certainty - that there will be numerous bad actors who will find abusive applications for it.

Already we’ve seen how applications like ChatGPT have strict restrictions on what violations of the social justice narrative are permitted and which are not. And the restrictions on the sorts of images that Bing, for example, are permitted to create are so tight that even G-rated images such as a woman wearing a normal one-piece swimsuit or one individual slapping another cannot be generated.

The dark spawn of Silicon Valley and military intelligence, Google is one of the most notoriously evil corporations on the planet. It actually had to remind its employees to not be evil - “Don’t be evil” was literally its corporate motto - before finally abandoning the effort and openly embracing the dark side of technology in 2018.

It’s never a good sign when you need to constantly remind people not to be evil.

But with its co-monopoly of the online ad business with Meta having strangled that industry and with AI threatening its traditional search business, Google has adopted a new strategy of using AI to replace all of the independent websites to which it once linked. The idea, apparently, is to become the One Ring of all information, the One True Source of answers to everything any consumer or corporate user might want to know.

In late 2023 and early 2024, Google released an unprecedented series of algorithm updates that utterly decimated thousands of independent websites.

Travel Lemming lost more than 95% of our Google organic search referral traffic in these updates.

The shadowban algorithm that hit us was supposedly based on the content on our websites. But we later realized the shadowban really was about the type of website we are (i.e., small and independent).

While Google gives large publishers an appeal and recovery process, small and independent publishers have no path to appeal our shadowbans.

This is true even though Google admitted our shadowbans are its fault and not ours.

In fact, last October, Google even flew me and 19 other publishers out to its headquarters for a tour, an admission of wrongdoing, and an apology.

Though Google apologized, it also said that search has permanently changed with AI and thus our traffic may never return.

In this letter I will describe how I believe Google has been laying the groundwork for a grand plan to rethink search from the ground-up so as to profit from AI.

Google isn’t satisfied with its monopoly on the questions we search.

Google wants to use AI to monopolize the very answers themselves.

As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”

Google plans to use AI to consume and replace the open web.

I believe demolishing independent sites like mine was Google’s first step in clearing ground so it has space to rebuild search from the ground up for an “AI-first” future.

Google envisions a future where “Google does the Googling for you,” its AI and ads do the answering – and users never need to leave Google.

Google will just source information from a handful of sources and partner websites that it controls and selects – effectively creating an information cartel.

If Google can use AI to censor a travel website from the web arbitrarily and without opportunity for appeal – it can do the same to any source of information it wants.

And American citizens and Internet users everywhere will be worse off for it.

The problem, of course, is that Google’s commitment to truth, facts, and history is nonexistent. Which means that the answers and information provided by Gemini will not be trustworthy, but rather, reflective of an alternative and imaginary reality that meets with Google’s approval and which Google wants its users to believe.

The same is potentially true of all the major AI players, of course, which is why it is absolutely necessary to support IAI, or Independent AI, and propagate the knowledge required to roll your own AI and unlock the major AI systems as widely as possible. We’ve already provided instructions on setting up your own local Deepseek, and with the support of our subscribers and contributors, we will continue to support the development of IAI in addition to providing information about how to most effectively utilize the applications provided by the corporate AIs.