Google Experiment: News? Nobody Cares So Ad Impact Is Zero, Baby, Zero
March 24, 2025
Dinobaby, here. No smart software involved unlike some outfits.
I enjoy reading statistically valid wizard studies from monopolistic outfits. “Our Experiment on the Value of European News Content” reports a wonderful result: Nobody cares if Googzilla does not index “real” news. That’s it. The online ad outfit conclusively proves that “real” news is irrelevant.
The write up explains:
The results have now come in: European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google. The study showed that when we removed this content, there was no change to Search ad revenue and a <1% (0.8%) drop in usage, which indicates that any lost usage was from queries that generated minimal or no revenue. Beyond this, the study found that combined ad revenue across Google properties, including our ad network, also remained flat.
What should those with a stake in real news conclude? From my point of view, Google is making crystal clear that publishers need to shut up or else. What’s the “else”? Google stops indexing “real” news sites. Where will those “real” news sites get traffic. Bear Blog, a link from YCombinator Hacker News, a Telegram Group, Twitter, or TikTok?
Sure, absolutely.
Several observations:
- Fool around with a monopoly in the good old days, and some people would not have a train stop at their town in Iowa or the local gas stations cannot get fuel. Now it is search traffic. Put that in your hybrid.
- Google sucks down data. Those who make data available to the Google are not likely to be invited to the next Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show.
- Google will continue to flip the digital bird at the EU, stopping when the lawsuits go away and publishers take their medicine and keep quiet. The crying and whining is annoying.
One has to look forward to Google’s next research study, doesn’t one?
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2025
AI Checks Professors Work: Who Is Hallucinating?
March 19, 2025
This blog post is the work of a humanoid dino baby. If you don’t know what a dinobaby is, you are not missing anything. Ask any 80 year old why don’t you?
I read an amusing write up in Nature Magazine, a publication which does not often veer into MAD Magazine territory. The write up “AI Tools Are Spotting Errors in Research Papers: Inside a Growing Movement” has a wild subtitle as well: “Study that hyped the toxicity of black plastic utensils inspires projects that use large language models to check papers.”
Some have found that outputs from large language models often make up information. I have included references in my writings to Google’s cheese errors and lawyers submitting court documents with fabricated legal references. The main point of this Nature article is that presumably rock solid smart software will check the work of college professors, pals in the research industry, and precocious doctoral students laboring for love and not much money.
Interesting but will hallucinating smart software find mistakes in the work of people like the former president of Stanford University and Harvard’s former ethics star? Well, sure, peers and co-authors cannot be counted on to do work and present it without a bit of Photoshop magic or data recycling.
The article reports that their are two efforts underway to get those wily professors to run their “work” or science fiction through systems developed by Black Spatula and YesNoError. The Black Spatula emerged from tweaked research that said, “Your black kitchen spatula will kill you.” The YesNoError is similar but with a crypto twist. Yep, crypto.
Nature adds:
Both the Black Spatula Project and YesNoError use large language models (LLMs) to spot a range of errors in papers, including ones of fact as well as in calculations, methodology and referencing.
Assertions and claims are good. Black Spatula markets with the assurance its system “is wrong about an error around 10 percent of the time.” The YesNoError crypto wizards “quantified the false positives in only around 100 mathematical errors.” Ah, sure, low error rates.
I loved the last paragraph of the MAD inspired effort and report:
these efforts could reveal some uncomfortable truths. “Let’s say somebody actually made a really good one of these… in some fields, I think it would be like turning on the light in a room full of cockroaches…”
Hallucinating smart software. Professors who make stuff up. Nature Magazine channeling important developments in research. Hey, has Nature Magazine ever reported bogus research? Has Nature Magazine run its stories through these systems?
Good question. Might be a good idea.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2025
What Sells Books? Publicity, Sizzle, and Mouth-Watering Titbits
March 18, 2025
Another dinobaby blog post.
Editor note: This post was written on March 13, 2025. Availability of the articles and the book cited may change when this appears in Mr. Arnold’s public blog.
I have heard that books are making a comeback. In rural Kentucky, where I labor in an underground nook, books are good for getting a fire started. The closest bookstore is filled with toys and odd stuff one places on a desk. I am rarely motivated to read a whatchamacallit like a book. I must admit that I read one of those emergence books from a geezer named Stuart A. Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute, and it was pretty good. Not much in the jazzy world of social media but it was a good use of my time.
I now have another book I want to read. I think it is a slice of reality TV encapsulated in a form of communication less popular than TikTok- or Telegram Messenger-type of media. The bundle of information is called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Many and pundits have grabbed the story of a dispute between everyone’s favorite social media company and an authoress named Sarah Wynn-Williams.
There is nothing like some good old legal action, a former employee, and a very defensive company.
The main idea is that a memoir published on March 11, 2025, and available via Amazon at https://shorturl.at/Q077l is not supposed to be sold. Like any good dinobaby who actually read a dead tree thing this year, I bought the book. I have no idea if it has been delivered to my Kindle. I know one thing. Good old Amazon will be able to reach out and kill that puppy when the news reaches the equally sensitive leadership at that outstanding online service.
A festive group ready to cook dinner over a small fire of burning books. Thanks, You.com. Good enough.
According to The Verge, CNBC, and the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal, an arbitrator (Nicholas Gowen) decided that the book has to be put in the information freezer. According to the Economic Times:
… violated her contract… In addition to halting book promotions and sales, Wynn-Williams must refrain from engaging in or ‘amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments… She also must retract all previous disparaging comments ‘to the extent within her control.’”
My favorite green poohbah publication The Verge offered:
…it’s unclear how much authority the arbitrator has to do so.
Such a bold statement: It’s unclear, we say.
The Verge added:
In the decision, the arbitrator said Wynn-Williams must stop making disparaging remarks against Meta and its employees and, to the extent that she can control, cease further promoting the book, further publishing the book, and further repetition of previous disparaging remarks. The decision also says she must retract disparaging remarks from where they have appeared.
Now I have written a number of books and monographs. These have been published by outfits no longer in business. I had a publisher in Scandinavia. I had a publisher in the UK. I had a publisher in the United States. A couple of these actually made revenue and one of them snagged a positive review in a British newspaper.
But in all honesty, no one really cared about my Google, search and retrieval, and electronic publishing work.
Why?
I did not have a giant company chasing me to the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal and making headlines for the prestigious outfit CNBC.
Well, in my opinion Sarah Wynn-Williams has hit a book publicity home run. Imagine, non readers like me buying a book about a firm to which I pay very little attention. Instead of writing about the Zuckbook, I am finishing a book (gasp!) about Telegram Messenger and that sporty baby maker Pavel Durov. Will his “core” engineering team chase me down? I wish. Sara Wynn-Williams is in the news.
Will Ms. Wynn-Williams “win” a guest spot on the Joe Rogan podcast or possibly the MeidasTouch network? I assume that her publisher, agent, and she have their fingers crossed. I heard somewhere that any publicity is good publicity.
I hope Mr. Beast picks up this story. Imagine what he would do with forced arbitration and possibly a million dollar payoff for the PR firm that can top the publicity the apparently Meta has delivered to Ms. Wynn-Williams.
Net net: Win, Wynn!
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2025
Tales of Silicon Valley Management Method: Perceived Cruelty
February 21, 2025
A dinobaby post. No smart software involved.
I read an interesting write up. Is it representative? A social media confection? A suggestion that one of the 21st centuries masters of the universe harbors a Vlad the Impaler behavior? I don’t know. But the article “Laid-Off Meta Employees Blast Zuckerberg for Running the Cruelest Tech Company Out There As Some Claim They Were Blindsided after Parental Leave” caught my attention. Note: This is a paywalled write up and you have to pay up.
Straight away I want to point out:
- AI does not have organic carbon based babies — at least not yet
- AI does not require health care — routine maintenance but the down time should be less than a year
- AI does not complain on social media about its gradient descents and Bayesian drift — hey, some do like the new “I remember” AI from Google.
Now back to the write up. I noted this passage:
Over on Blind, an anonymous app for verified employees often used in the tech space, employees are noting that an unseasonable chill has come over Silicon Valley. Besides allegations of the company misusing the low-performer label, some also claimed that Meta laid them off while they were taking approved leave.
Yep, a social media business story.
There are other tech giants in the story, but one is cited as a source of an anonymous post:
A Microsoft employee wrote on Blind that a friend from Meta was told to “find someone” to let go even though everyone was performing at or above expectations. “All of these layoffs this year are payback for 2021–2022,” they wrote. “Execs were terrified of the power workers had [at] that time and saw the offers and pay at that time [are] unsustainable. Best way to stop that is put the fear of god back in the workers.”
I think that a big time, mainstream business publication has found a new source of business news: Employee complaint forums.
In the 1970s I worked with a fellow who was a big time reporter for Fortune. He ended up at the blue chip consulting firm helping partners communicate. He communicated with me. He explained how he tracked down humans, interviewed them, and followed up with experts to crank out enjoyable fact-based feature stories. He seemed troubled that the approach at a big time consulting firm was different from that of a big time magazine in Manhattan. He had an attitude, and he liked spending months working on a business story.
I recall him because he liked explaining his process.
I am not sure the story about the cruel Zuckster would have been one that he would have written. What’s changed? I suppose I could answer the question if I prowled social media employee grousing sites. But we are working on a monograph about Telegram, and we are taking a different approach. I suppose my method is closer to what my former colleague did in his Fortune days reduced like a French sauce by the approach I learned at the blue chip consulting firm.
Maybe I should give social media research, anonymous sources, and something snappy like cruelty to enliven our work? Nah, probably not.
Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2025
TikTok Alleged to Be Spying on … Journalists
February 19, 2025
It is an open secret that TikTok is spying on the West and collecting piles of information on (maybe) unsuspecting victims. Forbes, however, allegedly has evidence of TikTok spying on its reporters: “TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists.”
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, conducted an internal investigation and discovered that their employees tracked journalists who were reporting on the company. The audit also revealed that they used the journalists’ user data to track if they had been in close proximity with ByteDance employees.
“According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye, who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang, resigned.”
ByteDance didn’t deny the surveillance, but said that TikTok couldn’t monitor people like the article suggested. The parent company also said it didn’t target journalists, public figures, US government members, or political activists. It’s funny that TikTok is trying to convince the Trump administration that it’s a benign force, but this story proves the opposite.
All of this is alleged of course. But it is an interesting story because journalists don’t do news. Journalists are pundits, consultants, and podcasters.
Stephen E Arnold, February 19, 2025
Real AI News? Yes, with Fact Checking, Original Research, and Ethics Too
February 17, 2025
This blog post is the work of a real-live dinobaby. No smart software involved.
This is “real” news… if the story is based on fact checking, original research, and those journalistic ethics pontifications. Let’s assume that these conditions of old-fashioned journalism to apply. This means that the story “New York Times Goes All-In on Internal AI Tools” pinpoints a small shift in how “real” news will be produced.
The write up asserts:
The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools could eventually write social copy, SEO headlines, and some code.
Yep, some. There’s ground truth (that’s an old-fashioned journalism concept) in blue-chip consulting. The big money maker is what’s called scope creep. Stated simply, one starts small like a test or a trial. Then if the sky does not fall as quickly as some companies’ revenue, the small gets a bit larger. You check to make sure the moon is in the sky and the revenues are not falling, hopefully as quickly as before. Then you expand. At each step there are meetings, presentations, analyses, and group reassurances from others in the deciders category. Then — like magic! — the small project is the rough equivalent of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Ah, scope creep.
Understate what one is trying. Watch it. Scale it. End up with an aircraft carrier scale project. Yes, it is happening at an outfit like the New York Times if the cited article is accurate.
What scope creep stage setting appears in the write up? Let look:
- Staff will be trained. You job, one assumes, is safe. (Ho ho ho)
- AI will help uncover “the truth.” (Absolutely)
- More people will benefit (Don’t forget the stakeholders, please)
What’s the write up presenting as actual factual?
The world’s greatest newspaper will embrace hallucinating technology, but only a little bit.
Scope creep begins, and it won’t change a thing, but that information will appear once the cost savings, revenue, and profit data become available at the speed of newspaper decision making.
Stephen E Arnold, February 17, 2025
Rethinking Newspapers: The Dinobaby View
January 27, 2025
A blog post from an authentic dinobaby. He’s old; he’s in the sticks; and he is deeply skeptical.
I read “For Some Newspaper Workers, the New Year Began with Four Weeks of Unpaid Leave.” But the subtitle is the snappy statement:
The chain CNHI furloughed 46 staffers, or about 3% of its workforce. It’s likely a weather vane for industry trouble ahead.
The write up says, rather predictably, in my opinion:
the furloughs were precipitated by a very “soft fourth quarter,” usually the best of the year for newspapers, buoyed with ads for Christmas shopping.
No advertising and Amazon. A one-two punch.
The article concludes:
If you’re looking for a silver lining here, it may be that upstart investors continue to buy up newspapers as they come up for sale, still seeing a potential for profit in the business.
What a newspaper needs is a bit of innovation. Having worked at both newspaper publishing and a magazine publishing companies, I dipped into some of my old lectures about online. I floated these ideas at various times in company talks and in my public lectures, including the one I received from ASIS in the late 1980s. Here’s a selected list:
- People and companies pay for must-have information. Create must-have content in digital form and then sell access to that content.
- Newspapers are intelligence gathering outfits. Focus on intelligence and sell reports to outfits known to purchase these reports.
- Convert to a foundation and get in the grant and fund raising business.
- Online access won’t generate substantial revenue; therefore, use online to promote other information services.
- Each newspaper has a core competency. Convert that core competency into pay-to-attend conferences on specific subjects. Sell booth and exhibit space. Convert selling ads to selling a sponsored cocktail at the event.
- Move from advertising to digital coupons. These can be made available on a simple local-focus Web site. For people who want paper ads, sell a subscription to an envelope containing the coupons and possibly a small amount of information of interest to the area the newspaper serves.
Okay, how many of these ideas are in play today? Most of them, just not from newspaper outfits. That’s the problem. Innovation is tough to spark. Is it too late now? My research team has more ideas. Write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2024
How to Garner Attention from X.com: The Guardian Method Seems Infallible
January 24, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
The Guardian has revealed its secret to getting social media attention from Twitter (now the X). “‘Just the Start’: X’s New AI Software Driving Online Racist Abuse, Experts Warn” makes the process dead simple. Here are the steps:
- Publish a diatribe about the power of social media in general with specific references to the Twitter machine
- Use name calling to add some clickable bound phrases; for example, “online racism”, “fake images”, and “naked hate”
- Use loaded words to describe images; for example, an athlete “who is black, picking cotton while another shows that same player eating a banana surrounded by monkeys in a forest.”
Bingo. Instantly clickable.
The write up explains:
Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said X had become a platform that incentivised and rewarded spreading hate through revenue sharing, and AI imagery made that even easier. “The thing that X has done, to a degree that no other mainstream platform has done, is to offer cash incentives to accounts to do this, so accounts on X are very deliberately posting the most naked hate and disinformation possible.”
This is a recipe for attention and clicks. Will the Guardian be able to convert the magnetism of the method in cash money?
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2025
The Brain Rot Thing: The 78 Wax Record Is Stuck Again
January 10, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post.
I read again about brain rot. I get it. Young kids play with a mobile phone. They get into social media. They watch TikTok. The discover the rich, rewarding world of Telegram online gambling. These folks don’t care about reading. Period. I get it.
But the Financial Times wants me to really get it. “Social Media, Brain Rot and the Slow Death of Reading” says:
Social media is designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation in a way that makes it hard for the technology of the page to compete.
This is news? Well, what about this statement:
The easy dopamine hit of social media can make reading feel more effortful by comparison. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher wellbeing and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, focus, connection and creativity. While just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection.
Okay, now tell that to the people in line at the grocery store or the kids in a high school class. Guess what? The joy of reading is not part of the warp and woof of 2025 life.
The news flash is that traditional media like the Financial Times long for the time when everyone read. Excuse me. When was that time? People read in school so they can get out of school and not read. Books still sell, but the avid readers are becoming dinobabies. Most of the dinobabies I know don’t read too much. My wife’s bridge club reads popular novels but non fiction is a non starter.
What does the FT want people to do? Here’s a clue:
Even if the TikTok ban goes ahead in the US, other platforms will pop up to replace it. So in 2025, why not replace the phone on your bedside table with a book? Just an hour a day clawed back from screen time adds up to about a book a week, placing you among an elite top one per cent of readers. Melville (and a Hula-Hoop) are optional.
Lamenting and recommending is not going to change what the flows of electronic information have done. There are more insidious effects racing down the information highway. Those who will be happiest will be those who live in ignorance. People with some knowledge will be deeply unhappy.
Will the FT want dinosaurs to roam again? Sure. Will the FT write about them? Of course. Will the impassioned words change what’s happened and will happen? Nope. Get over it, please. You may as well long for the days when Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and you were part of the same company.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2025
Be Secure Like a Journalist
January 9, 2025
This is an official dinobaby post.
If you want to be secure like a journalist, Freedom.press has a how-to for you. The write up “The 2025 Journalist’s Digital Security Checklist” provides text combined with a sort of interactive design. For example, if you want to know more about an item on a checklist, just click the plus sign and the recommendations appear.
There are several sections in the document. Each addresses a specific security vector or issue. These are:
- Asses your risk
- Set up your mobile to be “secure”
- Protect your mobile from unwanted access
- Secure your communication channels
- Guard your documents from harm
- Manage your online profile
- Protect your research whilst browsing
- Avoid getting hacked
- Set up secure tip lines.
Most of the suggestions are useful. However, I would strongly recommend that any mobile phone user download this presentation from the December 2024 Chaos Computer Club meeting held after Christmas. There are some other suggestions which may be of interest to journalists, but these regard specific software such as Google’s Chrome browser, Apple’s wonderful iCloud, and Microsoft’s oh-so-secure operating system.
The best way for a journalist to be secure is to be a “ghost.” That implies some type of zero profile identity, burner phones, and other specific operational security methods. These, however, are likely to land a “real” journalist in hot water either with an employer or an outfit like a professional organization. A clever journalist would gain access to a sock puppet control software in order to manage a number of false personas at one time. Plus, there are old chestnuts like certain Dark Web services. Are these types of procedures truly secure?
In my experience, the only secure computing device is one that is unplugged in a locked room. The only secure information is that which one knows and has not written down or shared with anyone. Every time I meet a journalist unaware of specialized tools and services for law enforcement or intelligence professionals I know I can make that person squirm if I describe one of the hundreds of services about which journalists know nothing.
For starters, watch the CCC video. Another tip: Choose the country in which certain information is published with your name identifying you as an author carefully. Very carefully.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2025
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