Today's links

• When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops: Botshit, botshit everywhere.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: White Wolf's pay-to-play; Penn on artistic satisfaction, California antitrust v Google; Project 2025's true meaning
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops (permalink)

It's been more than a year since I gave up on Google Search (I switched to Kagi.com and never looked back). I don't miss it. It had gotten terrible. It's gotten worse since, thanks to AI (of course):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google's a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that's not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked.

In the spring of 2024, it was clear that Google had lost the spam wars. Its search results were full of spammy garbage content whose creators' SEO was a million times better than their content. Every kind of Google Search result was bad, and results that contained the names of products were the worst, an endless cesspit of affiliate link-strewn puffery and scam sites.

It's not that the internet lacks for high-quality, reliable reviews. There are plenty of experts out there who subject a wide range of products to careful assessment, laboratory tests, and extensive comparisons. The sites where these reviews appear are instantly recognizable, and it's a great relief to find them.

One such site is Housefresh.com, whose proprietor, Giselle Navarro, runs a team that produces extremely detailed, objective, high-quality reviews of air purifiers. This is an important product category: if you're someone with bad allergies or an immunocompromising condition, finding the right air purifier can exert enormous influence on your health outcomes.

As good as Housefresh are at reviewing air purifiers, they are far less skilled at tricking Google. The world champions of this are spammers, content farms that produce garbage summaries of Amazon reviews and shovel them into massive, hidden sections of once-reputable websites like Forbes.com and Better Homes and Gardens, and thus dominate the Google results for product review searches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Google calls this "site reputation abuse" and has repeatedly vowed to put a stop to it, and has repeatedly, totally failed to do so. What's more, Google has laid of more than 10,000 workers, including "core teams," even while spending tens of billions of dollars on stock manipulation through "buyback" schemes:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

Of course, the Housefresh team are smart cookies – hence the high caliber of their air purifier reviews – and they could apply that intelligence to figuring out how to use SEO to trick Google's algorithm. Rather than doing so, they took the high road: they applied all that prodigious analytical talent to researching and publishing on Google's systematic failures – and even collusion – with the spammers who are destroying the web.

This month, Housefresh released its latest report on Google's enshittification, this time with an emphasis on the "AI Overviews" that now surmount every search results page. Google has widely touted these as the future of search, a way to bypass the ad-strewn, popup-obscured, AI-sloppified (!) pages that it is seemingly powerless to filter out of its search corpus:

https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

Rather than hunting through these SEO-winning garbage pages, you can simply refer to Google's AI Overview, which will summarize the best the internet has to offer, in hyperlegibile black sans-serif type on a white background, with key phrases helpfully highlighted in bold.

Most critiques of AI Overview have focused on how these AI Overviews are a betrayal of the underlying bargain between the web and its monopoly search engine, whereby we all write the web and let Google index it for free, and in exchange, Google will send us traffic in proportion to the quality of our work:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250611-ai-mode-is-google-about-to-change-the-internet-forever

This is true, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Google is a platform, which is to say, a two-sided marketplace that brings together readers and publishers (along with advertisers). The bargain with publishers is that Google will send them traffic in exchange for access to their content. But the deal with readers is that Google will help them answer their questions quickly and accurately.

If Google's marketing pitch for AI Overviews is to be believed, then Google is only shafting publishers in order to double down on its bargain with readers: to give us faster, better access to high-quality information (recall Google's mission statement, "To organize the world's information and make it useful"). If that's true, then Google is the champion of readers in their long battle with publishers, a battle in which they are nearly helpless before publishers' abusive excesses.

This is a very canny move on Google's part. Publishers and advertisers have more concentrated money than readers, but the dominant theory of antitrust since the Reagan administration is something called "consumer welfare," which holds that monopolistic conduct is only to be condemned if it makes consumers worse off. If a company screws its workers or suppliers in order to deliver better products and/or better prices, then "consumer welfare" holds that the government should celebrate and protect the monopolist for improving "efficiency."

But all that is true only if Google AI Overviews are good. And they are very, very bad.

In the Housefresh report, titled "Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies," Navarro documents how Google's AI Overview is wildly bad at surfacing high-quality information. Indeed, Google's Gemini chatbot seems to prefer the lowest-quality sources of information on the web, and to actively suppress negative information about products, even when that negative information comes from its favorite information source.

Indeed, Navarro identifies a kind of madlibs template that Gemini uses to assemble an AI overview in response to the query "Is the [name of air purifier] worth it?"

The [model] air purifier is [a worthwhile investment/generally considered a good value for its price/a worthwhile purchase]. It's [praised/well-regarded] for its ability to [clean the air/remove particles/clean large rooms]. Whether the [product] is worth it depends on individual needs and priorities.

This is the shape of the response that Google's AI Overview shits out when you ask about any air purifier, including a model that Wirecutter called "the worst air purifier ever tested":

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/worst-air-purifier-we-ever-tested/

What's more, AI Overview will produce a response like this one even when you ask it about air purifiers that don't exist, like the "Levoit Core 5510," the "Winnix Airmega" and the "Coy Mega 700."

It gets worse, though. Even when you ask Google "What are the cons of [model of air purifier]?" AI Overview simply ignores them. If you persist, AI Overview will give you a result couched in sleazy sales patter, like "While it excels at removing viruses and bacteria, it is not as effective with dust, pet hair, pollen or other common allergens." Sometimes, AI Overview "hallucinates" imaginary cons that don't appear on the pages it cites, like warnings about the dangers of UV lights in purifiers that don't actually have UV lights.

Google argues that AI Overview won't displace traffic to the sites it summarizes. The company points to the fact that the statements in an AI Overview are each linked to the web-page they come from. This is a dubious proposition, predicated on the idea that people looking up a quick answer on a search engine will go on to follow all the footnotes and compare them to the results (this is something that peer reviewers for major scientific journals often fail at, after all).

But the existence of these citations allowed Navarro to compile statistics about the sources that Google relies on most heavily for information about product quality:

• 43.1% of these statements come from product manufacturers' marketing materials;

• 19.5% of these statements are sourced from pages that contain no information about the product.

Much of the remainder comes from the same "site reputation abuse" that Google said it would stop prioritizing two years ago. An alarming amount of this material is also AI generated: this is the "coprophagic AI" problem in which an AI ingests another AI's output, producing ever-more nonsensical results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

The balance is primarily drawn from Reddit, who announced a major partnership with Google as part of the company's IPO:

https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/expanded-reddit-partnership/

Adding "reddit" to a Google query is a well-known and still-useful way to get higher quality results out of Google. Redditors is full of real people giving their real opinions about products and services. No wonder that Reddit appears in 97.5% of product review queries:

https://detailed.com/forum-serps/

Obviously, the same SEO scumbags who have been running circles around Google for years are perfecctly capable of colonizing and compromising Reddit, which has been rocked by a series of payola scandals in which the volunteer moderators of huge, reputable subreddit were caught taking bribes to allow SEO scumbags to spam their forums and steal their valor:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250607050622/https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/1kzzsuv/update_reddit_admins_have_escalated_the_paradise/

When it comes to product reviews, Google's AI Overviews consist of irrelevancies, PR nonsense, and affiliate spammer hype – all at the expense of genuine, high-quality information, which is still out there, on the web, waiting for you to find it.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is unapologetic about the way that AI Overviews blurs the line between commercial pitches and neutral information, telling Bloomberg, "commercial information is information, too":

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-24/google-s-ai-search-overhaul-racing-chatgpt-for-the-web-s-future

Which raises the question: why is Pichai so eager to enshittify his own service. After all, AI isn't a revenue center for Google – it's a cost center. Every day, Google's AI division takes a blowtorch the company's balance sheet, incinerating mountains of money while bringing in nothing (less than nothing, if you count all the users who are finding ways to de-Google their lives to escape the endless AI slop):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

It's true that AI loses money for Google, but AI earns something far more important (at least from Pichai's perspective): a story about how Google can continue to grow.

Google's current price-to-earnings (PE) ratio is 20:1. That means that for every dollar Google brings in, investors are willing to spend $20 on Google's stock. This is a very high PE ratio, characteristic of "growth stocks" (companies that are growing every year). A high PE ratio tells you that investors anticipate that the company will get (much) bigger in the foreseeable future, and they are "pricing in" that future growth when they trade the company's shares.

Companies with high PE ratios can use their stock in place of money – for example, they can acquire other companies with stock, or with a mix of cash and stock. This lets high PE companies outbid mature companies – companies whose growth phase has ended – because stock is endogeous (it is produced within the company, by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet) and therefore abundant, while dollars are exogenous (produced by the central bank – again, by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet! – and then traded to the company by its customers) and thus scarce.

Google's status as a growth stock has allowed it to buy its way to dominance. After all, Google has repeatedly, continuously failed to create new products in-house, relying on acquisitions of other people's companies for its mobile technology, ad-tech, server management, maps, document collaboration…virtually every successful product the company has (except Search).

For so long as investors believe Google is growing, it can buy other companies with its abundant stock rather than its scarce dollars. It can also use that stock to hire key personnel, which especially important for AI teams, where compensation has blasted through the stratosphere:

https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerbergs-meta-superintelligence-labs-poaches-top-ai-talent-silicon-valley-2025-07-08/

But that just brings us back to the original question: why build an AI division at all?

Because Google needs to keep up the story that it is growing. Once Google stops growing, it becames a "mature" company and its PE ratio will fall from 20:1 to something more like 4:1, meaning an 80% collapse in the company's share price. This would be very bad news for Googlers (whose personal wealth is disproportionately tied up in Google stock) and for Google itself (because many of its key personnel will depart when the shares they've banked for retirement collapse, and new hires will expect to be paid in scarce dollars, not abundant stock). For a company like Google, "maturity" is unlikely to be a steady state – rather, it's likely to be a prelude to collapse.

Which is why Google is so desperately sweaty to maintain the narrative about its growth. That's a difficult narrative to maintain, though. Google has 90% Search market-share, and nothing short of raising a billion humans to maturity and training them to be Google users (AKA "Google Classroom") will produce any growth in its Search market-share. Google is so desperate to juice its search revenue that it actually made search worse on purpose so that you would have to run multiple searches (and see multiple rounds of ads) before you got the information you were seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Investors have metabolized the story that AI will be a gigantic growth area, and so all the tech giants are in a battle to prove to investors that they will dominate AI as they dominated their own niches. You aren't the target for AI, investors are: if they can be convinced that Google's 90% Search market share will soon be joined by a 90% AI market share, they will continue to treat this decidedly tired and run-down company like a prize racehorse at the starting-gate.

This is why you are so often tricked into using AI, by accidentally grazing a part of your screen with a fingertip, summoning up a pestersome chatbot that requires six taps and ten seconds to banish: companies like Google have made their product teams' bonuses contingent on getting normies to "use" AI and "use" is defined as "interact with AI for at least ten seconds." Goodhart's Law ("any metric becomes a target") has turned every product you use into a trap for the unwary:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

There's a cringe army of AI bros who are seemingly convinced that AI is going to become superintelligent and save us from ourselves – they think that AI companies are creating god. But the hundreds of billions being pumped into AI are not driven by this bizarre ideology. Rather, they are the product of material conditions, a system that sends high-flying companies into a nosedive the instant they stop climbing. AI's merits and demerits are irrelevant to this: they pump AI because they must pump. It's why they pumped metaverse and cryptocurrency and every other absurd fad.

None of that changes the fact that Google Search has been terminally enshittified and it is misleading billions of people in service to this perverse narrative adventure. Google Search isn't fit for purpose, and it's hard to see how it ever will be again.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Radek Kołakowski modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/

• Auditors can’t save carbon offsets https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4864

• A course on political analysis based on these social media posts https://www.superpunch.net/2025/07/a-course-on-political-analysis-based-on.html

• The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work https://www.404media.co/the-medias-pivot-to-ai-is-not-real-and-not-going-to-work/

• Banking the Unbanked* https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago White Wolf kills its pay-for-play policy https://memex.craphound.com/2005/07/14/white-wolf-kills-its-pay-for-play-policy/

#15yrsago ACTA leaks — again https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/07/acta-so-transparent-the-text-still-has-to-be-leaked/

#15yrsago Photo-documenting the real Toronto backgrounds from Scott Pilgrim https://www.flickr.com/photos/25096269@N04/albums/72157624312642335/

#15yrsago Penn Jillette on artistic satisfaction and magic https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/7881171/Penn-and-Teller-interview.html

#15yrsago Mountains of putrid fat scraped off the sewer-walls beneath Leicester Square https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/walls-of-fat-removed-from-london-s-sewers-2025528.html

#15yrsago Gateways: Tribute to Fred Pohl with stories by Bear, Benford, Brin, Bova, Gaiman, Harrison, Haldeman and me! https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/14/gateways-tribute-to-fred-pohl-with-stories-by-bear-benford-brin-bova-gaiman-harrison-haldeman-and-me/

#5yrsago California goes antitrust on Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#feeling-lucky-punk

#5yrsago Big Oil can have you locked up https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#privilege-private-law

#5yrsago Target workers strike over chickenization https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#stay-on-target

#5yrsago Free "extended preview" of the third Little Brother book https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#masha-masha-masha

#5yrsago Artists vs tax havens https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

#5yrsago Catalan politician hacked with NSO Group malware https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#catalunya

#5yrsago Atlas of Surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#spookycops

#5yrsago Poesy the Monster Slayer https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#poesy

#1yrago The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Gisele Navarro.

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1018 words yesterday, 1018 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Seen from Jetty Resturant parking lot, Darwin, Northern Teritory, Australia

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Seen from Jetty Resturant parking lot, Darwin, Northern Teritory, Australia

SergioQ79 - Osanpo Photographer - posted a photo:

Kirishima è un luogo intriso di spiritualità e storia, ma lontano dai circuiti turistici affollati. In questa scena, un uomo si avvia in silenzio verso l'ingresso del santuario, mentre un bambino gioca con le pietre all’ombra dei grandi cedri. È una scena semplice ma significativa: due gesti diversi, uno legato al rito, l’altro alla spontaneità, che coesistono in un luogo che invita al rispetto e alla quiete. Il torii rosso segna il confine tra l’esterno e il sacro, ricordando che anche senza cerimonie vistose, il Giappone conserva luoghi dove la spiritualità si manifesta con naturalezza.

霧島は歴史と信仰が息づく場所でありながら、観光地の喧騒からは離れている。この場面では、男性が静かに神社へ向かい、子どもが杉の木の陰で石遊びをしている。異なる行動だが、どちらもこの土地の空気の中で自然に溶け込んでいる。朱色の鳥居は俗と聖の境界を示し、華やかな儀式がなくとも、日本にはこうした穏やかな信仰の場が今も残っていることを感じさせてくれる。

Kirishima is a place rich in spirituality and history, yet far from crowded tourist routes. In this scene, a man quietly walks toward the entrance of the shrine while a child plays with stones in the shade of tall cedars. It's a simple yet meaningful moment: two actions, one ritual and one spontaneous, sharing the same space. The red torii marks the threshold between the outside world and the sacred, a reminder that even without grand ceremonies, Japan still holds places where spirituality feels natural and unforced.

James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:

Hold onto your Gauntlet, Webb may have observed the birth of a supermassive black hole in the Infinity Galaxy!

The Infinity Galaxy was formed by the collision of two disk galaxies, resulting in this infinity shape made up of ring structures of stars around each galaxy. The nucleus of each galaxy is still visible, each with its own supermassive black hole. But between them, in a cloud of gas, appears to be a third, very active, supermassive, million-solar-mass black hole. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the VLA also provide evidence for a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. This is extremely unusual. How did it get there? Scientists think it likely formed there, and pretty recently - which would mean we could be seeing the birth of a supermassive black hole for the first time.

Nearly every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, but we still don’t understand how they are formed. There are two main theories. One is that they could form from a merger of stellar mass black holes. The other is that a giant black hole could form from the collapse of a large gas cloud. That could be what we are looking at here. The gas within these colliding galaxies could shock and compress, forming a dense knot of gas that then collapses into a supermassive black hole.

Though there are other possible explanations for the Infinity Galaxy black hole, the new data from Webb is strengthening the case that this is a newborn black hole formed by direct collapse.

Read more: go.nasa.gov/4lPy7be

Note: This post highlights a combination of peer-reviewed results and data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, P. van Dokkum (Yale University)

Image description: A pair of distant galaxies that form the rough shape of an infinity symbol seen at roughly a 45-degree angle. Two overlapping, fuzzy rings with brighter blue patches are at upper right and lower left. At the center of each ring is a bright yellow blob, which is the nucleus. Where the two rings overlap on the left side, there is a mottled green patch of glowing gas midway between the two yellow nuclei. It is offset slightly to the left.

MHKBB posted a photo:

Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein

Camera: Rolleicord Vb
Lens: Schneider Xenar 3.5/75
Film: LomoChrome Turquoise
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart

SergioQ79 - Osanpo Photographer - has added a photo to the pool:

Kirishima è un luogo intriso di spiritualità e storia, ma lontano dai circuiti turistici affollati. In questa scena, un uomo si avvia in silenzio verso l'ingresso del santuario, mentre un bambino gioca con le pietre all’ombra dei grandi cedri. È una scena semplice ma significativa: due gesti diversi, uno legato al rito, l’altro alla spontaneità, che coesistono in un luogo che invita al rispetto e alla quiete. Il torii rosso segna il confine tra l’esterno e il sacro, ricordando che anche senza cerimonie vistose, il Giappone conserva luoghi dove la spiritualità si manifesta con naturalezza.

霧島は歴史と信仰が息づく場所でありながら、観光地の喧騒からは離れている。この場面では、男性が静かに神社へ向かい、子どもが杉の木の陰で石遊びをしている。異なる行動だが、どちらもこの土地の空気の中で自然に溶け込んでいる。朱色の鳥居は俗と聖の境界を示し、華やかな儀式がなくとも、日本にはこうした穏やかな信仰の場が今も残っていることを感じさせてくれる。

Kirishima is a place rich in spirituality and history, yet far from crowded tourist routes. In this scene, a man quietly walks toward the entrance of the shrine while a child plays with stones in the shade of tall cedars. It's a simple yet meaningful moment: two actions, one ritual and one spontaneous, sharing the same space. The red torii marks the threshold between the outside world and the sacred, a reminder that even without grand ceremonies, Japan still holds places where spirituality feels natural and unforced.

Sorry, kon het niet laten. Het bericht op nu.nl had als subkop “Emotieherkenning niet altijd betrouwbaar“. In de titel van het bericht ging het over “AI-systemen die blijdschap en stress meten zijn volgens toezichthouder ‘dubieus'”, ook al zo’n vage classificering.
Ik wilde het gewoon scherp stellen: als de fundamentele aannames onder het herkennen van emoties met behulp van kunstmatige intelligentie “wankelen” (onvolledig of onjuist zijn), dan is het gebruik van emotieherkenning met behulp van AI onbetrouwbaar: je kunt er onvoldoende op vertrouwen dat de resultaten juist zijn.
Als de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP, die het rapport hebben opgesteld waar het nieuwsbericht op gebaseerd is) dan ook nog constateren dat er een gebrek aan transparantie is bij het inzetten ervan, en de gevolgen van onjuiste herkenning van emoties te groot zijn, dan is het duidelijk dat het verbod van het gebruik ervan in het onderwijs op de werkvloer (sinds februari 2025) zeker niet overbodig is, maar dat het verbod nog niet ver genoeg gaat.

Ik zocht in het rapport van de AP meteen naar vermelding van het Kuleshov-effect. Dit is een begrip uit de filmkunst en psychologie waarbij de emotionele interpretatie van een neutraal gezicht sterk wordt beïnvloed door de context (de beelden die aan het gezicht voorafgaan of volgen). In de oorspronkelijke demonstratie (jaren 1920) monteerde de Sovjetregisseur Lev Kuleshov een korte film waarin een uitdrukkingsloos gezicht van een acteur werd afgewisseld met verschillende scènes (bijvoorbeeld een kom soep, een lijk in een kist, een spelend meisje). Het publiek merkte daarbij ten onrechte emoties in het gezicht op (honger bij de soep, verdriet bij het lijk en verlangen bij het meisje) ondanks dat het gezicht telkens exact hetzelfde was. Kuleshov gebruikte dit om te illustreren dat montagetechnieken en context emoties in het gezicht “injecteren”. Ik had voor het eerst over het effect gehoord in een filmpje van Hannah Fry.
Het effect komt niet in het rapport voor. Nou weet ik dat er wetenschappelijk links en rechts wel wat kritiek was op het experiment. Het bronmateriaal is er niet meer, replicatiestudies vonden soms wel, soms geen effect. Een recente studie (met behulp van een MRI) vond wél een effect en algemeen wordt er vanuit gegaan dat context relevant is. En ondanks dat ze Kuleshov niet noemen, gaat ook de AP uit van de situationele en culturele context van emoties. Ze bekritiseren in het rapport de omstreden emotietheorieën die bv uitgaan van zaken als “één gezichtsuitdrukking = één emotie”. Die zijn te simplistisch en houden geen rekening met context of nuance.  Ook het aanvullen van afbeeldingen met fysiologische signalen zoals hartslag, pupilgrootte of stemintonatie, is niet onomstreden omdat ook die niet exclusief gelinkt zijn aan één emotie en ook hier is context (bv. stress door drukte versus stress door angst) van belang is. En slechts een paar systemen/modellen voor emotieherkenning maken gebruik van context. Wat dat betreft is het natuurlijk ook gewoon goed dat de AP er bovenop zit. Zij constateren namelijk dat concrete cases waarin nu emotieherkenning toegepast wordt laten zien dat het, afhankelijk van de setting, totaal anders uitpakt. Dus niet alleen iets wat onderzoekers zeggen, maar gewoon iets wat uit de praktijk blijkt. Maar ja, dan is het aan de politiek om te bepalen wat toegestaan is. In een tijd dat “men” van mening is dat Europa te strak is qua regels rond AI, zal niet iedereen staan te springen om dit aspect verder aan banden te leggen. Maar als het niet betrouwbaar is, dan kun je wat mij betreft niet anders.

Voor ons in het onderwijs blijft er in de tussentijd niet veel meer over dan het er voor zorgen dat iedereen zo AI-geletterd mogelijk is. Zodat ze ook buiten school en werk weten waar ze op moeten letten.

VEGHEL (ANP) - De staking van uitzendkrachten bij distributiecentra breidt zich uit. Inmiddels wordt er niet meer alleen gestaakt bij distributiecentra van Albert Heijn, maar ook bij locaties van Jumbo. Die laatste keten zegt dat de bevoorradingen van winkels en voor onlinebestellingen wel gewoon doorgaan.

Volgens vakbond FNV wordt er momenteel gestaakt bij acht distributiecentra. Waar de actie begon met zo'n 150 stakende uitzendkrachten is dat aantal inmiddels verdubbeld naar zo'n 300, aldus de bond. De acties zijn gericht op de nieuwe ABU-cao voor uitzendkrachten. FNV eist dat uitzendkrachten minimaal dezelfde arbeidsvoorwaarden krijgen als vaste medewerkers bij hun opdrachtgever.

Volgens een woordvoerster van Jumbo is er op dit moment geen impact voor klanten. Eerder meldde Albert Heijn wel enige bevoorradingsproblemen, waardoor sommige producten in bepaalde regio's tijdelijk minder beschikbaar waren. Later zei de supermarkt dat de bevoorrading weer was hersteld.

WASHINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De Verenigde Staten gaan een importtarief van 19 procent heffen op goederen uit Indonesië, terwijl Amerikaanse export naar het Zuidoost-Aziatische land onbelast blijft. Volgens de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump staat dat in een nieuwe handelsdeal met Indonesië.

"Zij betalen 19 procent en wij betalen niets", vertelde Trump dinsdag aan verslaggevers in het Witte Huis. "We krijgen volledige toegang tot Indonesië." Daarmee is de importheffing voor Indonesië verlaagd ten opzichte van eerder, toen het land een tarief van 32 procent in het vooruitzicht was gesteld.

Trump heeft de afgelopen week brieven met tariefaankondigingen gestuurd naar meerdere landen, waaronder Indonesië. Daarmee wilde hij de druk op onderhandelaars uit die landen opvoeren om nog voor 1 augustus, wanneer de heffingen zouden ingaan, nieuwe handelsafspraken te maken met de VS. Trump stelt rechtstreeks met de Indonesische president Prabowo Subianto te hebben onderhandeld om de deal rond te krijgen.

MP Materials aims to deliver US-made, recycled magnets by 2027

Apple has signed a deal with the only active rare earth mine under American control to begin sourcing magnets for its iDevices from the US - but not from the mine itself: Apple's going to recycle. …

In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite images of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — but one that delivers a powerful feeling of how large the world is and how meaningless borders are from a certain perspective.

The project started from a really simple place. It was about looking. It was about the pure desire to understand the visual landscape that we are talking about when we are talking about the southern border of the United States. What does the southern border of the United States actually look like? And in that sense it was a very simple gesture to try to see the border in aggregate. If you were to compile all 2000 miles and try to see it in a short space — what would that look like? In another sense it grew out of the discourses as you suggested. The way migration is talked about in our contemporary moment and in particular the way migration is talked about in terms of the southern border of the U.S. So part of this piece is a response to the way migrants and borders are talked about in our politics. And it’s also just a way of looking at landscape as a way to think about some of those things.

The online version of the film is 6 minutes long, but Begley states that longer versions might make their way into galleries and such.

[This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2016.]

Tags: geography · Josh Begley · Mexico · politics · timeless posts · USA · video

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'Wielrenster Puck Moonen zegt dat ze tijdens het fietsen belaagd is door tieners die haar met een stuk hout probeerden te raken. Twee jongeren zouden haar in een auto voorbij zijn gereden in het Gelderse dorp Opheusden.' Luister, wij zijn de laatste die zouden ontkennen dat wielrenners die per se op de weg willen fietsen terwijl enkele meters verderop gewoon een fietspad ligt BLOEDIRRITANT zijn. We zouden zelfs een lichte neiging om van die losers, die hun bierbuik in zo'n pakje heisen om lekker een middagje koers te LARPen en 'WHEEEEAAAUJJ' te schreeuwen naar alles wat voor ze aan de kant moet, een keer genadeloos af te snijden. Maar we hebben het hier over Puck Moonen. Dé topsport-incluencer van de Lage Landen, bekend geworden als profwielrenster die niet kon profwielrennen en het liefje van een Britse autocoureur die niet zo goed kon autocoureuren. Die heeft het heus niet makkelijk. Haar dan ook nog eens van de weg af rijden en proberen te raken met een stuk hout (??) is gewoon ZIELIG.

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