My concern would be that they count this as positive engagement, then use those metrics to encourage integration of gen AI into more products. “Users love our new AI feature, they spend hours chatting with it!”

Yeah it’s not just the surveillance marketing. No parent wants their kid addicted to brain rot content YT pushes on children.

100% agree and can confirm (from working in an industry overrun by gen AI) that the vast majority of content is now AI generated with the sole purpose of being cited in AI search, and that quantity and newness are both factors in being cited.

The remediation techniques I’ve found are to refer to “trusted” sources of information like Wikipedia or to ask a question here on Lemmy. Both are unfortunately still prone to AI generated content, but better than what typically comes up in a Google or DDG search.

I (unfortunately) work in an industry where companies used to live or die by the amount of website traffics they received. 5 years ago the goal was to write the best content for your users, abiding by the EEAT principle - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Basically good advice given by proven experts. Since the rise of LLMs it’s like we don’t even consider human users anymore. All content is geared towards having your brand show up in AI search. The content itself is all AI generated drivel, but no one cares about that as long as ChatGPT mentions your name when asked about a related topic.

Edit: to answer your question more directly, websites exist for users. Your website only gets users if it appears in search. It used to be that higher quality content was the way to do that, but now that search is largely driven by gen AI, the quality of the content is less important than the specific structure and “freshness” (i.e. how recently it was published) that AI platforms prefer.

I don’t think Microsoft recorded the URLs, just activity from a GDID and IP address at particular timestamps. The authorities would also have subpoenaed records from other accounts they knew were his e.g. Snapchat and Facebook. The GDID was just a way of assigning activity from his device to particular VPN endpoints at particular times. The point of the story is essentially that the GDID allowed them to track his device across multiple IP addresses. But this wouldn’t have been possible without at least some other pieces of the puzzle such as knowing which was his Microsoft account, or Facebook account etc. in the first place.

+1 would like to see some screenshots of your fantasy desktops!

Personally I’ve found my happy medium by using Ubuntu desktop as my daily driver with a few old Windows VMs e.g. for when I’m feeling nostalgic or need to run a pre-enshittified app. I use Proton Web (proxy for browsing 90s era websites) on Windows 95, and Adobe Creative Suite 6 under Windows 7.

As I look into the various recommendations I’m leaning towards something like this. The asset management tools look great for, well, managing assets, but I think a wiki will still be more suited to the level of documentation I want to keep.

It may be possible to get something usable, but why reinvent the wheel when there are so many tried and tested options out there already? Part of the problem is I don’t know exactly what I want yet, and seeing not only what others are using, but how they’re using it is incredibly helpful. IMO this real world experience isn’t something gen AI can replicate. Thank you for the suggestion though.