I did an investigation into the situation. Some of you may enjoy: https://edithistory.substack.com/p/whats-going-on-with-roberto-bolanos
And if any of you have additional angles I could explore, including if you were the artist who first drew the sketch or if you've spent time editing any Bolaño-related articles, let me know. I'd be happy to write more about this.
Enthusiasts of Archimboldi are Archimboldeans. I wrote out Bolañoean and wasn't sure if that made sense. Bolañoheads? Bolaño buffs?
So far this is anecdotal, but I've been running some experiments in which I pit my own sites against one another, creating both a slop and a human-written version of the same topic. I'm finding that the slop version tends to win in Copilot but usually not in any other major platforms. (I'm specifically looking at the Google family, Copilot/Bing, Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT.)
If you aren't familiar, "AI slop loop" is something first coined by Lily Ray. It's essentially citogenesis but specific to AI hallucinating or inventing something, an article or blog post entering the internet, and then other AI search platforms picking up and regurgitating the hallucination.
My experiments are showing me that Copilot is the biggest perpetrator of the AI slop loop. However, I'd love to know if anyone else is seeing this in your AI tracking tools. I'm using BWT and Scrunch as my data points, but I'd be curious if Peec or Profound or any of the others are also showing this kind of thing. Down to share more of my research for anyone who might be interested.
I'd also love to collaborate on a study around this if any of you have ideas on how to scale something like this.
I was looking at what fun stuff is coming up in town in the next few months, then figured I would share it here:
I'm sure I missed some events. Add 'em in the comments if so!
Useful links:
I can start putting this calendar together with more regularity, if folks find it helpful. Maybe a monthly look at what's ahead. I didn't find anything with all these events assembled in my googling.
Anyone been yet? I know SLP isn't Hopkins but still, cool: https://thecandyshopmn.com/
I walked past and saw the sign on the door today. Interested to see who moves in.
Do at least one fun thing this weekend: https://www.raspberrycapital.com/
All of you are invited to contribute. It has basically nothing as of now:
https://search-industry.fandom.com/wiki/Search_Industry_Wiki
I have a variety of reasons I'm doing this which I can explain if anyone is interested. One of the reasons is that I think Wikipedia has extremely weak articles on search and I'm curious if we could build something better in a place where contributors wouldn't need to learn the rules of contributing to Wikipedia.
This isn't a joke and I'm not trolling. I have not seen any case studies about an llms txt file being implemented that resulted in measurable improvements. I have looked and not found one. Anyone have one?
I re-read Bag of Bones recently and then moved onto Roadwork. I noticed that both novels contain Bartleby the Scrivener references. In Bag of Bones it's explicit (the characters talk about Bartleby throughout the book) and I think Roadwork is meant to be a contemporary retelling of Bartleby. Has anyone picked up on this? Or any other Bartleby references in his work?