because they can sell it for more money and as a bonus controlling people’s data gives them power. Supervillains love technology.

This orb surveillance thingy looks like Wheatley from Portal 2, an AI which eventually turned evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatley_(Portal) I’m sure that’s a good sign.

This article is full of BS. I mean he at least arrives at an agreeable conclusion (see headline) and this is why this post will get upvoted a lot. But his narrative is full of strawman arguments, trying to find plausible “conservative” reasons for why the US is acting the way it does when the actual answer is much simpler.

The author argues at length that “Europhobia” is causing the rift between the US and EU. That’s BS. If there is any phobia from the US perspective it’s an Anybody-Who-Is-Not-Us-Phobia. US foreign policies stem from a sense of absolute superiority. They are not targeting the EU for being the EU. They are indiscriminately and aggressively trying to bully every other country into submission.

The whole article is an exercise in finding justifications for not calling it what it is. This is a typical Think Tank style spin.

And this gem right here:

If Brexit was the first blow against the EU from a new Europhobic movement in America […]

Talking about sense of superiority… The author actually thinks that the US was the prime force responsible for the Brexit? They definitively played their part in the Brexit but this is a bit much.

I could go on, but it’s not worth it. I just wanted to make you aware of how shitty this article is.

Probably depends on what AI DDG is using… I switched DDG to noai so I don’t see any generated results

Interesting, if i do site:neocities.org with a random search term e.g. site:neocities.org anime in DDG I get zero results. In google, this yields thousands of neocities subdomains. Do you get any relevant results in DDG this way?

I chose a random neocities website and searched with both DDG and Google. The search was “irony machine neocities” without quotes. Google yielded a result which pointed to the correct URL https://irony-machine.neocities.org/ while DDG did not.

Yeah, I think SEO is pretty much dead by now, and probably because web search as we knew it is kind of dead as well. You’ll probably need to spend ad money if you want visibility. But I’m no expert on SEO and I could be wrong.

Well they might be able to fuck with the signal in a way similar to Selective Availability or turn off the signal entirely over a specific region? Can you rule that out? The current US government has no issues with breaking things even if it hurts their own citizens.

Before you say haha no one is using bing… Your beloved DuckDuckGo uses bing results and this means it’s censored there too. And it’s not only about the start page https://neocities.org/ (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.

It’s not that wild of a conspiracy theory. Hard to get definite proof though because you would have to compare actual search results from the past with the results of the same search from today, and we unfortunately can’t travel back in time.

But there are indicators for your theory to be true:

• It’s evident that in UI design the top area of the screen is the most valuable. AI results are always shown there. So we know that selling AI is of utmost importance to Google.
• The Google search algorithm was altered quite often over the years, these “rollouts” are publicly available information, and a lot of people have written about the changes as soon as they happened.
• Page ranking fueled a whole industry which was called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of effort went into understanding how google ranks its results. This was of course done with a different goal in mind but the conclusions from this field can be used to determine if and how search results got worse over time
• It’s an established fact that companies benefit from users never leaving the company’s ecosystem. Google as an example tried to prevent a clickthrough to the actual websites in the past, with technologies like AMP or by displaying snippets.
• If users rely on the AI output Google can effectively achieve this: the user is not leaving the page and Google has full control over what content the user sees.

Now, all of the points listed above can be proven. If you put all of that together it seems at least highly likely that your “conspiracy theory” is in fact true.

The article itself looks like it’s written with AI. Inconsistencies, repetitions, dull language and an unnecessary bullet point summary at the end. While I haven’t read the actual study, nothing in the article seems to explain what makes this causation instead of correlation.

Personally I’m a bit annoyed with articles like these because they try to create the impression that criticism of AI only stems from it being too powerful, instead of recognizing that the technology has very real capability limits. What is presented as two opposing viewpoints is effectively just one. AI boosters and AI doomers are both strong believers in something that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen for a very long time.