#google algorithm update news

[googleupdates-world]

Boost Your Online Presence with Expert SEO Link Building Strategies

Learn the art of SEO link building to enhance your website's visibility and authority. Explore proven techniques and best practices to improve your search engine rankings and drive organic traffic to your site.

[areswriter]

Google Core Update Maret 2025: Cara Gue Bertahan dan Naik Rank

Beberapa minggu lalu, gue mulai ngerasa ada yang aneh. Salah satu artikel gue yang biasanya nangkring di page one, tiba-tiba hilang. Gue cek Search Console, traffic drop. Bukan cuma satu artikel, tapi hampir semua konten di kategori berita dan hiburan.

Awalnya gue kira cuma fluktuasi biasa. Tapi ternyata... ini gara-gara Google Core Update Maret 2025.

Gue mulai ngulik dan bandingin. Ternyata ada pola.

Artikel yang terlalu "SEO banget" yang gue buat dengan gaya lama: keyword masuk di H1, meta, sebar keyword di paragraf awal, dan lain-lain—justru anjlok. Padahal sebelumnya teknik itu selalu berhasil. Tapi sekarang? Kalah sama artikel yang gaya bahasanya lebih natural dan fokus ke pembaca, bukan ke mesin.

Dari situ gue mulai ubah pendekatan. Gue coba riset ulang. Bukan soal keyword doang, tapi gue mulai dari niat: artikel ini bantuin pembaca atau cuma buat dapet traffic?

Gue juga sempet eksperimen pakai AI buat beberapa konten. Tapi kali ini, gue gak copy hasilnya mentah-mentah. Gue ubah, gue tambahin insight pribadi, gue revisi gaya bahasanya biar lebih enak dibaca manusia. Hasilnya? Artikel itu balik naik pelan-pelan. Bahkan satu artikel soal properti yang gue anggap “sepele” malah naik drastis dan sekarang jadi salah satu traffic source tertinggi di blog gue.

Sektor lain kayak berita, e-commerce, bahkan hiburan yang sebelumnya ngasih traffic lumayan, sekarang kayaknya makin susah bersaing. Apalagi lawan kita media-media besar kayak Detik, Tempo, Ares188 bahkan Halodoc pun ikut kena. Tapi ya itu, siapa cepat adaptasi, dia yang bertahan.

Gue gak bilang semua artikel lama harus dihapus. Tapi sekarang gue mulai evaluasi: mana yang harus dirombak total, mana yang cukup dioptimasi ulang. Dan sejauh ini, strategi itu ngebantu banget.

Kalau lo masih pakai pola lama, mungkin ini saatnya mulai berpikir ulang. Fokus ke user experience. Nulis bukan buat ngejar mesin, tapi buat bantu orang yang baca.

Oh ya, beberapa insight dan inspirasi tulisan juga gue dapetin waktu mampir ke www.astriroma.com. Banyak referensi menarik buat yang lagi nyari gaya konten yang lebih genuine dan tetap perform.

[digitalpreeyam]

Google constantly updates its search algorithm to improve user experience and provide the most relevant results. These updates range from minor tweaks to major changes that significantly impact website rankings. Google’s primary goal is to enhance search accuracy, combat spam, and prioritize high-quality content.

Key updates like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT, and Helpful Content Update have reshaped SEO strategies over the years. In recent times, Google’s focus has shifted towards AI-driven search, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and Core Web Vitals for better page experience.

For SEOs and businesses, staying updated on algorithm changes is crucial to maintaining online visibility. Regularly monitoring Google Search Console, following SEO best practices, and focusing on user-centric content can help websites adapt effectively. As Google continues evolving, those who prioritize quality content, user experience, and ethical SEO strategies will stay ahead in the search game. 

[isubhamdas]

Local SEO Insights from Google's Leak

Learn how Google’s API documentation leak can improve your local SEO strategies. Continue reading to discover actionable insights and expert tips to boost your local rankings. Local SEO Insights from Google’s API Documentation LeakVideo Content Matters for Local SEOLocal Bot Clicks and CRAP SignalsLocal Authority vs. Topic AuthorityLSAs vs. Google AdsTwiddling with Local ResultsAdditional Local…

[searchengineexplorer]

https://searchengineexplorer.blogspot.com/2023/09/google-wraps-up-august-2023-core-update.html

Google Wraps Up August 2023 Core Update: What It Means for You

Google has officially completed the rollout of its August 2023 Core Update. This marks the second core update of the year, with the process commencing on August 22, 2023, and concluding 16 days later on September 7, 2023.

This Core updates impacting the website rankings.💡 Analyze data for improvements.🔍 Stay informed for online success. 📈 SEO experts to assess the impact.

[lakhveerkaur]

New Google Updates

Google Updates are important for Seo and webmasters. These algorithm filters, changes, and data refreshes are important to a website that suffers a drop in ranking. Most updates are always to improve the quality of the search results and relevance. They have more impact than a Data Refresh and simply update the data used by the algorithm. If you want more information. Contact us at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

[mad-hare]

A long long time ago, before we had apps and algorithms telling us what to listen to, it was sort of difficult to find new indie music to listen to. I become a follower of this guy I discovered online who would post monthly downloadable playlists of indie songs. This was mostly over the years 2008-2009. One month he had updated us that the playlists had to stop temporarily because he was going to jail (unclear if it was due to the music pirating which was possible back then). After a few months of silence I stopped checking for updates and never went back despite some of my all time favourite songs coming from these playlists.

It’s interesting in hindsight I guess to think about how much an internet stranger can shape a part of who you are as a person, over a decade later I still listen to songs I found on these playlists regularly.

In terms of internet space lingo we could call this curation, where a person with whom you can personally relate to will introduce you to new things in a related sense. and I’d like to add that they are not doing this for monetary gain/advertisement. Some people think with the death of google and the onslaught of algorithms that don’t really understand why they’re telling you to try certain things, that curation is due for a large scale revival. (Especially now with that new website substack that the younger kids are latching on to).

Anyways, I decided to look up the playlist and I found it’s still being produced to this day, Blalock’s Indie Rock Playlist;

birp.fm

[googleupdates-world]

Decoding the Google Algorithm: A Deep Dive into Search Rankings

Explore the intricate world of the Google algorithm, the driving force behind search engine rankings. In this comprehensive guide, we unravel the complexities of how Google's algorithm functions, from crawling and indexing to ranking websites. Gain insights into the ever-evolving search landscape and understand the factors that influence your website's visibility in search results. Stay ahead of the curve and optimize your online presence with a better grasp of the Google algorithm's inner workings. Join us on a journey to enhance your digital presence and reach your audience effectively.

[snoozykazoo]

we're on tumblr again yay✨

Hey everyone! And welcome to Snoozy Kazoo's first ✨TUMBLR DEVPOST!!✨ We'll be releasing these every month from now on as a way to keep everyone updated on Snoozy Kazoo news!

If you're new here, hi! We’re Snoozy Kazoo, a game dev studio of six guys who make dumb, silly, and fun games. You might know us from the games Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, available HERE and HERE!

Let's get caught up! In this issue we're covering a new mobile release, anniversaries, and... our NEW GAME? 😳😳😳

What's Snoozy been up to?

Ok I know what I said earlier, but let’s be honest: if you’ve stumbled deep into the mines enough to find your way here, you’re surely familiar with our beloved Turnip Boy. We just passed by his anniversary of robbing a bank on January 18th! Aww! They grow up so fast… But it’s a good thing he’s not robbing banks anymore, that’s a crime, you kn-

Aw crud he's doing it on your phone now

Snaps my fingers disappointingly. Aw man. Yerrrrp. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is now on iOS and Android devices near you. His mindless yet fervent desire to wreck crime upon the world seems insatiable. It’s really unfortunate, except for the fact that it’s honestly really fun watching him go at it.

The game is available TODAY on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store! Re-experience the game or force your friends to — its fun either way!

Ahhh the beloved Turnip Boy. Surely your next game will be about him right?

Heehee nope!

Excitingly, in November, we announced our next game: Hobnobbers! A co-op mall-looter where you rob malls for your goddess!

If you haven’t already wishlisted the game yet, well… go wishlist it! Go make your friends wishlist it! Wishlist wishlist wishlist! It really helps us beat the Algorithm Overlords, so literally every single wishlist counts!

I already know about your little crow-gnome mall-looting game you do not shut up about it. What else is new?

We also released a new devlog over on our YouTube! We’ll be releasing one of these every few months, so make sure to subscribe!

In it, we’ve covered the game’s conception till its early development, which means a lot of concept art. Honestly, let’s toss a little bit more of it over here; it’s always exciting to see behind the curtain!

Now get ready for... 🥁🥁🥁

Woah! What’s this little place? Perhaps the chance to get to meet different members of the team and bombard them with questions to foster a parasocial relationship with them? No way!

Introducing… Alexis! Our Unreal Developer!

What are you most excited for in Hobnobbers?

I’m very excited for a lot of different technical aspects and seeing people’s reaction to the game! I want to see all of the systems come together to create a perfect storm of chaos. The randomly generated map ontop the hexes system, with events like Money Storms, Floods, and Fairy Circles of Doom, is going to make each run completely unique and you’ll never know what kind of madness you’re getting into! On launch day I intend to be hopping into games with people (and fixing any bugs that crop up).

What’s something you’ve worked on in Hobnobbers recently that you’ve found particularly frustrating?

The level generation for the mall has been a particular nightmare, but in a very fun way. The mall is generated from bottom-to-top and each floor tells the floor above it about the different combinations of rooms that it can generate. This allows us to have those iconic vertical levels that overlap eachother with walkways above the floors below! This has required a lot of tuning in both making the parts that generate, and how to place them to get results that are always interesting (without bugs). Not only do we have to generate each floor, we also have to generate each store! Accounting for the size and placement of these is a constant challenge when making segments but I made a blender template that speeds it up quite a lot.

What pitch did you end up bringing to the pitch competition?

My pitch was a game about a vampire who was ousted from their castle by another vampire, and is trying to take it back. You would have to sneak back in through various pathways that challenge you in different ways, some would require parkour skills, others would require puzzle solving. And while you’re doing all of this, the AI learns and adapts to your behavior setting traps or blocking off paths in a constant game of cat and mouse. I am still extremely passionate about this idea, and fully intend to pursue it one day!

Awesome! Thank you for your time! 😊

Okie dokie that’s a wrap for now

In future devposts, we’ll be including questions sent in by the community! Feel free to send them in over here on Tumblr, or join our Discord and ask questions in the “ask-the-devs-❓” channel!

See you soon!

— Kiki

[yonahsienna]

This Was Supposed to Be Fun

Or: WTF happened to the online Commons, and where do we go now?

Let me start by saying that I don't want to be a "content creator" or “online influencer”. I don't want to "optimize engagement" or “build an agile social strategy”. I don’t even particularly want to Start a Blog or Podcast. I just want to f#��&!ng hang out with my friends and community online, and I feel like we should have The Technology to just do that by now.

Of course (infuriatingly) we did have that technology! I first connected to the World Wide Web in 2001 when I was ten years old. Back then, the whole family shared one computer, which I mostly used to play Age of Empires, Bugdom, and Oregon Trail. Connecting to the Internet meant that nobody could use the phone, so we would log on quickly (accompanied by a symphony of discordant whistles and beeps), check emails and/or MSN messages, and then pass the computer to the next person.

As our access to the Internet grew through my teens, so did the diversity of content we consumed, shared, and bonded over. eBaum’s World and Newgrounds hosted a plethora of simple, free webgames we'd play once we got bored with the handful my parents were willing to buy, as well as the first viral videos like Numa Numa and Star Wars Kid. We also connected in new ways with a growing “social web” — profiles on sites like Myspace and Livejournal and eventually the early Facebook were a way that anyone could have their own site on the web, a little virtual locker that you could decorate and fill up to your liking, and have your friends stuff with virtual notes.

In my late teens and early twenties, the Internet was mostly for research and keeping up with student government and clubs via long weekly emails stuffed with hyperlinks and attachments. It wasn't until I was well into my twenties that I got my first smartphone. At university, the only way to connect to the Internet “on the go” was to tweet my on-the-go thoughts by sending an SMS text message to Twitter at 21212. I also hardly used the social web anyways, other than for a quick dopamine distraction or break from long study sessions in the library. I had even deleted my Facebook account that I'd had since high school, since the campus coffee shop and bar served as more than enough of a hub for socializing, philosophical and political debates, and important announcements posted on cork boards or delivered by intercom.

I know I probably sound like a stereotypical Millennial, whining about the “good ole days”, but I wanted to spend this time on memory lane for a reason. I think that no matter when you grew up, this feeling is probably close to universal: from the early 2000s to early 2020s, the Internet and social web seemed to just work. There were a lot of things wrong with the world, but the Internet was where we went to complain about other problems, not a source of them. But of course, even back then we were living on borrowed money and time. The virtual Commons we had grown comfortable in never actually belonged to us, the users. From the moment they incorporated, the big sites belonged to venture capital, who sold them out to the oligarchs, who sold them out to the fascists. We were never the customer, always the product.

Flash forward to 2025. The “big four” North American social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) have all been captured by the Trump administration. Smaller sites, like Reddit, Telegram, and Substack have long been a hotbed for bigotry and hate speech. Searches on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Pinterest are serving up LLM “AI” slop before authentic and unique human creations. Ads, suggestions, sponsored posts, and cookie pop-ups take up far more space than the content I came for. And if I ever want my family, friends, and community to actually see my updates, I either need to send them to each person directly, or market my posts not to them, but to an algorithm optimized not for users or even businesses, but shareholder profit. On top of all of this, there is a pervasive sense of how uncomfortably public, permanent, and surveilled it all is. (In parallel to all this: efforts to gather in person are cut at the knees by a lack of coherent and safe public health policies, the dismantling of Third Spaces and affordable public transportation, and the militarization of the police.)

It is horrifying that exactly when the biggest thing we need for survival is to build and strengthen community, that the only accessible tools to do so, are hostile to our very existence.

Obviously this isn’t a coincidence. Every time we, the people, can talk to each other directly, we start getting dangerous ideas about the fact that the ultra-wealthy and hyper-elite are so few, and the rest of us are so many. Pamphlets facilitated the French and American revolutions, the telegraph and radio hastened the collapse of the Russian and German Empires, and Twitter fanned the flames of the Arab Spring. And here in America, The Powers That Be, Red and Blue alike, overwhelmingly want the American government in strict control over where and how we can communicate with each other.

And here I am, just hoping for a single F#¢&!NG site on the whole World Wide Web where I can just hang out with family, friends, and community that isn't owned and operated by literal fascists, kept behind a paywall, or too technical for our Elders to use. A comfy virtual coffee shop with announcement boards, conversations, the occasional performance, and a locker nearby for collecting memories and passing notes.

I don’t really know what the Takeaway/Call to Action is here. Yes, I’m already on Tumblr, Mastadon, and Bluesky, and would love it if we all continued to grow these kind of alternatives while divesting from profit-driven social "platforms". I’m still on Discord, Snapchat, and Signal and even have accounts on Loops, Pixelfed, and Xiaohongshu, in case the center of gravity ever moves over to those places. All of them still feel very "under construction" though, so I don't even know which (if any) I feel comfortable asking friends and family to "switch over" to. In the meantime, I'm just feeling lost, sad, lonely, and adrift; and wanted to share these musings with y’all. Just in case anyone has any advice you want to share, or are feeling the same way and want to commiserate.

xposted to Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and WriteAs. God, I hate the Internet right now >:(

[theleatherdragon]

The TMI Update

Welp, I guess it's been about a year since I was last really active online aside from a few places. It wasn't by choice, that's for sure lmao?? But I suppose I should give a bit of a life update for the people that are curious about my absence. A TL;DR for some people: my health was garbage, my parents health is even more garbage, and I wanna come back to the art community online but I'm not sure when/how between the recent ai/art theft and website changes while I was gone.

It started with my mystery health issues. From about May 2023 to Feb 2025, I was dying, slowly. Like I was losing my hair, my muscles, I had no energy, my brain was just constantly fogged up like a dementia patient, I couldn't stay awake for more than 4-7 hours a day, I couldn't eat, I was scared that I wouldn't wake up the next day every single night I went to bed. It started off slowly and then by around April 2024, it just snowballed into catastrophe. After burning through 16+ different doctors of all kinds, none of them would help me despite multiple blood tests being flagged as either too high or too low. They all kept telling me that I'm just depressed or some other wacky crap like "you're just a woman, this is normal."

Eventually I learned that you can buy your own tests on Labcorp, and through trial and error I learned that I had 0 estrogen and 0 testosterone. Apparently a pill that I had been taking for years, the ingredients got changed in 2023 and it completely wrecked my hormones. That's when I learned just how much work hormones do, and I found a doctor to change my pills because apparently I was going through something that was considerably WORSE than menopause. I've been on this new pill for 80+ days now and literally every symptom I had is just completely gone now.

Unfortunately, as soon as I figured out my health mystery and started to get better again, my parents were rushed to the hospital. On April 13 my dad got a ct scan of his lungs to see how bad his pneumonia was and I saw the screen and said oh god that's cancer. Not only does he have cancer, he has TWO separate lung cancers, both stage 4. And then while dealing with that, my mom's cancer that she's had since 2021 has gotten worse. It's been nothing but a nightmare for the last year, but now it's gotten significantly worse. To the point that we even went to buy a family burial plot. Not many people my age get to brag about having their own cemetery plot reserved already, hand picked by myself lmao??

I lost my grandmother in February and now there's a good chance I'll be losing both of my parents this year as well, we're not sure yet. Since April I've probably spent a few hundred hours in and out of the hospital with them and driving them to radiation/chemo treatments and just ugh, I'm exhausted.

Aside from all of that grief, my other problem with being online has been a mixed bag of bad too. I sort of had my online world rocked last year after discovering things about some so called friends and other things about my art, and that really broke me too. All my life I just wanted to be an artist, to draw fun characters and have fun art trades and all sorts of things with the community. But apparently some people were just using me for their fetishes or trying to gain their own reputations and just, I'm not like that man. I literally am so ace coded that I thought the debate between top and bottom was for bunk bed choices like lmao bro

I started building my own website to combat that and also the fact that a lot of art websites have succumbed to the ai/art thieves mess. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to build it and also as soon as I created it, Google decided to take my website and stick it on their algorithm even though I specifically had it coded to NOT do that. All the other search engines respected my request and so I went to Google asking about it. I followed their instructions and now ALL the search engines have my website. Unless I can find a way to stop that, I'm going to have to password protect my website so that bot crawlers won't see my things and make it super easy access to the wrong people.

I really do miss being online though and making art for and with people. Unfortunately I'm going to have to make some big changes in the near future before I can come back, but I wanted to at least drop an update on things. I'm absolutely going to power through Art Fight again this year, so you can catch me there if I haven't returned elsewhere by then. It's really unfortunate how much these websites have changed while I was gone, but I won't be leaving if I can help it.

I really hope everyone else has had a much better time than me. Aside from all the health scares, my life hasn't been terrible. I got back into photography and a few other crafts, I just haven't been posting things online. Heck, I haven't even been on Discord in months now, I honestly have no idea what all has changed for a while. I just haven't had the mental ability to do much aside from lurking on Tumblr here and there, but even then some of the negative things I see are just too much to bare for my mental state of being right now.

I want to come back soon, but I'm scared at how fragile my mind is lately. It doesn't help that my hormones have come back in full swing, so it's really weird going almost 2 years of feeling nothing to suddenly feeling everything again lmao??

Anywho, this is a big enough wall of text for now. I really hope you're doing awesome and I wish nothing but the best for you. I really hope we can all make art again soon!

[vitalphenomena]

@eyeshone // joey

THE LAUNDROMAT DOWN THE BLOCK IS WHERE DAFNE DOES HER WEEKLY WASHING. While the cycles run, she updates her website obsessively on her phone. New fonts. The right pop of color. Competitive pricing. Words she thinks will sound good to the Google algorithm (while she really has no idea about any of that stuff).

It is too late for a young woman to comfortably be alone at night. Dafne, though, is not alone, despite being one of two people currently in the laundromat. Phil lurks, Dafne's shadow swirling as she hunches over one of the middle tables meant for folding clothes. A lightbulb flickers, but she is used to working in such distracting circumstances.

Joey Hellberg enters surreptitiously. Surprisingly effective at remaining discrete, at first. He is here to place surveillance devices around the public-facing portion of the laundromat, and, if he's good enough, which he might not be, in the back rooms, too.

From a table in the back—some sort of pseudo receptionist set-up—a young man lazily watches Dafne's ass as she changes over her clothes. His real focus allows his peripheral to perceive Joey a machine or two down as he not-sneakily-sneakily places a bug on one of the washers.

The not-receptionist can immediately tell Joey is up to no good. Well—only no good if you think Dmitri Smerdyakov attempting surveillance on a money laundering (get it?) and drug enterprise is inherently, ontologically bad, which Dmitri would argue is completely debatable.

The not-receptionist is antsy. He is bored. He is eager for action; he hardly gets to do any of the exciting criminal enterprise stuff all day. He pulls a handgun from the waistband of his jeans and fires twice, without aiming. Just to scare Joey.

The bullets' trajectories will end in collision with Dafne's back—or, wait, her front. When the gun—unsilenced—goes off—POP, POP!—she flinches, screams, and goes to turn towards the noise. In a split second, she will be shot.

A split second is plenty of time for him to act.

The bullet ripples, then explodes into shrapnel. The jagged metal pieces, devastating and deadly on their own despite their size when compared to the original bullet from whence they came, scatter in the air. They shatter the glass doors of several washing machines and dryers, which is a bummer for whoever is really in charge of this place.

The not-receptionist drops his gun and runs for the back.

The bummers keep coming, too. A piece of shrapnel—or many one large piece and several microscopic pieces—embeds in Joey's neck. His chest.

"Sorry!"

Dafne steps towards Joey.

"Sorry, sorry—I think—that was—my fault!"

Dafne is hyperventilating.

[mariacallous]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued new instructions to scientists that partner with the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) that eliminate mention of “AI safety,” “responsible AI,” and “AI fairness” in the skills it expects of members and introduces a request to prioritize “reducing ideological bias, to enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness.”

The information comes as part of an updated cooperative research and development agreement for AI Safety Institute consortium members, sent in early March. Previously, that agreement encouraged researchers to contribute technical work that could help identify and fix discriminatory model behavior related to gender, race, age, or wealth inequality. Such biases are hugely important because they can directly affect end users and disproportionately harm minorities and economically disadvantaged groups.

The new agreement removes mention of developing tools “for authenticating content and tracking its provenance” as well as “labeling synthetic content,” signaling less interest in tracking misinformation and deep fakes. It also adds emphasis on putting America first, asking one working group to develop testing tools “to expand America’s global AI position.”

“The Trump administration has removed safety, fairness, misinformation, and responsibility as things it values for AI, which I think speaks for itself,” says one researcher at an organization working with the AI Safety Institute, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

The researcher believes that ignoring these issues could harm regular users by possibly allowing algorithms that discriminate based on income or other demographics to go unchecked. “Unless you're a tech billionaire, this is going to lead to a worse future for you and the people you care about. Expect AI to be unfair, discriminatory, unsafe, and deployed irresponsibly,” the researcher claims.

“It’s wild,” says another researcher who has worked with the AI Safety Institute in the past. “What does it even mean for humans to flourish?”

Elon Musk, who is currently leading a controversial effort to slash government spending and bureaucracy on behalf of President Trump, has criticized AI models built by OpenAI and Google. Last February, he posted a meme on X in which Gemini and OpenAI were labeled “racist” and “woke.” He often cites an incident where one of Google’s models debated whether it would be wrong to misgender someone even if it would prevent a nuclear apocalypse—a highly unlikely scenario. Besides Tesla and SpaceX, Musk runs xAI, an AI company that competes directly with OpenAI and Google. A researcher who advises xAI recently developed a novel technique for possibly altering the political leanings of large language models, as reported by WIRED.

A growing body of research shows that political bias in AI models can impact both liberals and conservatives. For example, a study of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm published in 2021 showed that users were more likely to be shown right-leaning perspectives on the platform.

Since January, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been sweeping through the US government, effectively firing civil servants, pausing spending, and creating an environment thought to be hostile to those who might oppose the Trump administration’s aims. Some government departments such as the Department of Education have archived and deleted documents that mention DEI. DOGE has also targeted NIST, the parent organization of AISI, in recent weeks. Dozens of employees have been fired.

“Those changes are pretty much coming straight from the White House,” says Stella Biderman, executive director of Eleuther, a nonprofit working with the AI Safety Institute. “The administration has made its priorities clear, [and] it isn't surprising to me that rewriting the plan was necessary to continue to exist.”

In December, Trump named David Sacks, a longtime Musk associate, as the White House AI and crypto czar. It is currently unclear whether he or anyone from the White House was involved in setting the new research agenda. It is also uncertain whether the new wording will have much impact on the work most researchers are doing.

The AI Safety Institute was created by an executive order issued by the Biden administration in October 2023, at a time of heightened concern over rapid progress in AI.

Under Biden, the institute was tasked with tackling a range of potential problems with the most powerful AI models, such as whether they could be used to launch cyberattacks or develop chemical or biological weapons. Part of its remit was to determine whether models could become deceptive and dangerous as they advance.

An executive order issued by the Trump administration this January revoked Biden’s order but kept the AI Safety Institute in place. “To maintain this leadership, we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas,” the executive order states.

Speaking at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February, vice president JD Vance said that the US government will prioritize American competitiveness in the race to develop and benefit from AI. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance told attendees from around the world. The US delegation to the event did not include anyone from the AI Safety Institute.

The researcher who warned that the change in focus could make AI more unfair and unsafe also alleges that many AI researchers have cozied up to Republicans and their backers in an effort to still have a seat at the table when it comes to discussing AI safety. “I hope they start realizing that these people and their corporate backers are face-eating leopards who only care about power,” the researcher says.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

[discussionswithgyetti]

Blog Post #3

Q1: Although social media is public, are there moral issues for the monopolization of spaces in which marginalized groups may go to cry and create change (especially while taking into account current government states)? 

In the revolution will be digitized, the authors discuss the role of the internet as a public sphere for activism for black activism, during a time in which there was a lack of safe, public spheres for social change. (Everett, 2011). This book was created in 2011, before the extreme monopolization of social media platforms. The use of unofficial forum websites have died down, and individuals often use these new platforms to elicit social movement and create eroding change. However, especially taking into account the current climate of politics, and the digital revenue based oligarchy that appears to be forming within the United States, I would like to question what the moral implications of these “public spheres”, when taking into account that the attention we provide, the adds we watch, and the data we give, all seems to line the pockets of capitalist oppressors. 

Q 2: The new jim code states “thus, even just deciding what problem needs solving requires a host of judgements; and yet we are expected to pay no attention to the man behind the screen”. In what ways do narratives and discussions around new technologies affirming the idea that new technologies are “unbiased”? 

Algorithms and data driven decision making is often seen as “out of the hands” of individual technicians and social media programers. As is stated in the race after technology, the new Jim Code article (Benjamin, 2020), a neoliberalism, colorblind view of technology has taken president. I reflected back on my own experiences prior to this class, as I also had lived under the assumption that algorithms were deemed as absolute. After taking into account my previous opinions on algorithms, and what this article states in regards to neoliberalism and productivity, I realized that production in “logic” has been moralized as being good, without further thought. Logic being different then empirical evidence, logic more so meaning a no nonsense, individualistic approach to the world. 

Q3: How does the exclusivity and gatekeeping of knowledge about algorithms contribute to its continued harm, as in regards for marginalized communities. 

In this week's Power of Algorithms chapter, the author states “It is impossible to know when and what influences proprietary algorithmic design, … except as we engage in critique and protest” (Noble, 2018). This statement made me question, how has the privatization of these public spaces prevented marginalized individuals from being a part of the conversation when it comes to their own algorithms, and what information they see? If updates and changes are made that change the info that people are exposed to, then why are consumers NOT more a part of the algorithm creation process? 

Q4: How might issues regarding online algorithms worsen as Artificial intelligence takes search engines by storm, now automatically generating simple consumable answers? 

This question stems from an ending remark made in the power of algorithms chapter (Noble, 2018), stating that there is a lack of human context in some types of algorithmically driven decisions.? Questions for me arise, such as, what results are used in the AI image generations? It can’t be all sources, are they the sources that pay money to be prioritized on google? The further distilling of responsibility (now AI being seen as absolute truth) may make it even harder for individuals to fight against algorithmic oppression, because it adds another “middle man”. 

References:

Benjamin, R. (2020). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 

Everett, A. (2011). “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Reimaging Africanity in Cyberspace.” Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, State University of New York Press, pp. 147–82. 

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.