“Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated. The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.”

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

I was in a meeting yesterday to plan responding to an invitation to tender. One of the terms in the invitation is “AEO”, which I now know stands for “Answer Engine Optimisation”.

The naivety of this astonishes me. The answer engines in question are *not good actors*.

They can and will:

- steal content
- use it to synthesise an answer and (here’s the crucial bit)…
- that answer may or may not prioritise your URL and the odds are that it *won’t*…

Fonts were my downfall.

Sometime around 1977, in an artists’ supplies shop in King’s Lynn where my mum was buying gouache paints, I discovered Wire-O bound Letraset and Letragraphica catalogues, and a seed was sown.

That you could layer what is said with how to say it on the page became a thing of wonder to me.

A bit later, not sure when, I learned that graphic design was a thing and that seemed soooo much more appealing as a vocation than joining the RAF…