Webcology

The world itself is burning as hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the sudden and sweeping changes coming to search results pages in 2025. While AI-faked images of the Hollywood sign burning are posted as news on partisan websites we talk about the sudden drought of fresh content for LLMs to train on now that everything ever written has been consumed and the use of AI created synthetic data to putty over an increasingly pockmarked information environment. While highly informed D-list celebrities berate government officials for their hiring practices and inability to control the weather, we discuss how AI generative results removes the concept of "canonically correct" answers in place of a response generated to answer a series of queries as well as possible but not necessarily the same way twice. Facebook has signaled its allegiance to the new order citing the reelection of President Trump as a cultural tipping point at the same time politicized messages overwhelmed the factual information that might help people in what has become the biggest natural disaster in American history. We even try to draw ourselves back as we note how much we don't want to be political but all this is happening in the environment we work in and we slowly realize that maybe there's no way to not be political when talking about what's going on. Damn...