I’m on paternity leave for the next few weeks, so have time for reading and to indulge in some futurology inspired by the generative AI revolution we’re living through:

SEO

1. Google and Bing will soon ask that content substantially generated by AI is identified via structured data, or a page level metatag. That will be shown to users in the SERPs and used as a ranking factor.
2. Google & Bing will build incresingly sophisticated classifiers to detect AI content, any that’s not marked up will be penalised
3. Google and Microsoft need to ensure that content creators are remunerated either by traffic, visibility or payment, or content creators will stop allowing their content to be scraped. It either sucks or is a goldmine to own Stack Exchange now.
4. CDNs that can distinguish and deny access to bots scraping them will become mandatory for any content creator (I’m buying CIBR despte the P/E ratio)
5. Even if consumers adopt chat as a UI, traditional search will be around for years. Some users have been ‘Googling’ for 25 years, and they won’t stop quickly.

Assistants

1. Google, Microsoft, Meta and maybe Tesla will have an AI assistant that follows you in your house, car, phone. Apple will release a similar ‘revolutionary’ new Siri, 2 years after everyone else, it will be great, and I’ll buy it.
2. ‘On premise’ hosted business assistants that; take notes, summarise meetings and actions, provide status updates etc., will be a huge business. This will be a two way fight between Google and Microsoft with Salesforce etc a distant third.
3. As well as generic assistants, there will be specific assistants for specific tasks e.g.
    Coding: CoPilot
    Images: Dalle, Midjourney
    Copywriting: Frase.io, Copy.ai etc
    Video generation: Synthesia, Meta
   ..and every other creative act; Gaming, education, Product Management etc etc

Entertainment

1. The cost of creating video content will be a fraction of what it is now, to the disadvantage of movie studios and advantage of small independent creators.
2. It’s a matter of time before there are breakout TV series and movies partly or wholly created by AI.
3. There will be fewer blockbuster hits, instead there will be a lot of niche movies and series.
4. Unless Netflix is nimble, independent creators will distribute, advertise and monetise on YouTube - one way that Google can substantially benefit from generative AI.

Society

1. People who don’t understand what generative AI can do will find themselves defrauded in novel new ways.
2. People will anthropomorphise their assistants - fall in love with them, mourne them when they are deprecated etc.
3. These models are expensive to run. Those who can afford premium services will have a huge advantage over those that can only afford limited, generic, slow, ad supported or no equivalent.
4. There’s a lot of talk about ‘Alignment with human values’ but whoever defines those values has power. People will turn to models that more or less reflect their own world view.

Social media

1. Everyone will generate slick AI composite photos, then they will become cliches. Flawed, obviously real photos will be considered best. Then AI will generate those too.
2. Unless they develop sophisticated filtering, it’s a disaster for anonymous text based social networks (Reddit, 4Chan, free Twitter etc). There is a huge incentive for spammers to create realistic accounts to shill products etc. People on these sites have been talking to bots for years, but when they realise it, usage of these sites will drop hugely.
   

Let’s see how many I’m right about 12 months from now!

Header image courtesy of Dalle-2.