The Algorithm has Failed Us

And it is only getting worse.

If you are having trouble making waves, you’re not alone. The whole venture is rigged. There was a blip when access was incredibly open, and that era has been closing like a sci-fi blast door for a decade now.

Out for a nice walk this morning with my camera, I was enjoying myself . It was another day to listen to Neale James podcast. I’ll admit I’m deep in the back catalog, so I am not up to date. Yet, one discussion stuck out to me. The transformation of the old publishing structures into whatever we have now.

Often, I have found myself frustrated with typical SNS. As time has gone on, I have gotten much and much better at photography. Yet, as time goes on, the SNS delivery system brings me less and less eyes to the work that I choose to do.

The thing is that the algorithm is not just doing my work dirty, it’s doing my time dirty. All of this generative and predictive stuff encourages a boring flatness.

One of the opinions I am coming to realize that I share is that AI is starting to rob us of experiences when other people choose to use it. I was floored by a student saying they were exhausted by losing out on the discussion that would happen if their classmates actually did their assignments. Yes, that is the case.

It generates a bit of frustration. I see articles on here that are clearly AI, but they succeed. Therein lies one of my big rubs with the whole venture. AI is a declaration that the interaction we could have had isn’t worth effort. When somebody sends me an AI message at work, I was a problem they wanted to solve. They really thought, “how can I communicate with less effort,” and I’m the one left out on it.

It’s deeper than that, though. The word cat-fishing comes to mind. AI is cat-fishing my time. And it isn’t just AI, it’s SNS content creators who are more interested in interacting one-way. I don’t mind that so much, but it gets jarring when they stack AI on top. People who don’t comment back tend to not be people that I end up following for long. I was never really a fan of social media para-sociality.

Truly, though, it isn’t just AI. Everything is flattening and enshittifying on the internet. Google search is a mess. YouTube can’t seem to decide what I should watch next with any credibility.

How many music videos are you away from ending up on a never-ending live lofi playlist? How many away from some generic pop-hit in whatever genre you’re enjoying? If in photo-land, how many auto-play videos are you from a photo 101 class?

This has been getting more and more apparent as I watch through old television shows. For whatever reason, the autoplay never goes to the next episode of the show. If it’s a documentary, it autoplays some more recent rendition of a similar topic on a new show. Mr. James got me re-watching old episodes of Cousteau and it takes one autoplay for it to dump me into contemporary documentaries about sharks. Obviously, anyone with a brain should know not to dump me there.

Thus, the crux, AI and generative search assumptions misunderstand intention and they cannot read images. Categories like photography and art are particularly difficult to deliver appropriately. The algorithm cannot well distinguish genre within the field. Niches like photography are treated somewhat flatly.

Over on this corner of the internet, how long until the feed shows you one of the top substacker’s posts within your genre?

That is part of why I find myself withdrawing more and more from the things that expose me to those things. I do not scroll in any meaningful way on instagram anymore. That’s a bummer. I scroll because IG does successfully deliver me CFPs that I save and then get more CFPs. A vicious cycle, indeed.

Yet, even if IG was delivering me photos, they tend to not really be photos that I want to see anyway. I keep coming back to the question was it always that bad at referring content?

Anyway, thus ends a casual musing. AI stole the content of the world’s libraries, the last thing I want is for that much to steal my time in the future in some form or another. I will thus be more diligent.

In the end, photography will survive. It won’t be because analog photography is an escape from all of this, but because we will still find voices we can trust. That’s ultimately why I spend some time here, and why I have my photography friends.

Until next time. Cheers,
Hanz

(photos of doors not crossed from the archive)