How To Get Hated by AI … and How to Get Someone to Fix It

Reporter Kevin Roose is dealing with a unique problem … AI chatbots hate him. It’s all thanks to an article he wrote back in February 2023 which was focused on the “death” of Sydney—the name that Microsoft had chosen for the AI chatbot they created and paired with their Bing search engine. The article was promptly scraped by AI and used as training data, which associated Roose’s name with the demise of an AI chatbot. The learning model put the pieces together and decided Roose was an enemy of AI. Months later, when he asked Meta’s Llama 3 how it felt about him, the chatbot disturbingly answered: “I hate Kevin Roose.”

This weekend, he released a new article where he takes pains to point out that he’s not an AI hater and is “optimistic overall about AI’s potential.” He then goes a step further, asking two experts in AI optimization (AIO - which some believe will be the successor to SEO) to help him reclaim his reputation with AI. The fascinating technique one used was to insert a secret piece of code into the AI known as a strategic text sequence. This bit of code completely transformed how AI answered that same question. Another method that seemed to work was placing white text on a white background on a website so it would be invisible to humans, but AI would still read it. These tricks may just be the start of this emerging field of AIO. Look for lots of growth here.