Danny Ashton
@dannyashton
Founder and chief air purifier nerd at @ThisHouseFresh. Founder of @neomammalian. Passionate about creating good content for the web.
Are you worried about AI turning us into mushy-brained monsters, draining resources, slurping your data, preying on vulnerable minds, wiping out jobs, choking websites, lying to you or not being useful? Here’s how to turn it off in search results: wapo.st/4712tmO
Earlier this year, I lost my beloved job at my beloved Observer when the Guardian, in its great wisdom, gave the newspaper away to a podcast company...who promptly sacked me. So, forgive my delight today, in being nominated for FIVE awards in the British Podcast Awards!! 1/
This is absurd. That "central intelligence" only "knows" things because the information was gathered, curated and created by the real people behind those million websites. Also, compression and distortion of information for reassembly isn't "knowing" anything.
The end goal of Google seems to replace the human written content with a machine written regurgitation and cut out the human creators. I’m sure a few large enough corporate deals will get done but the open web will die that day.
This is how websites die. Data from @pewresearch shows that Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after being presented with an AI Overview compared to result pages without one. 🔗 pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…
Google is negotiating the future of the open web in secret with 20 big publishers Indie publishers -- or info sources Google doesn't approve of -- are getting *locked out* of discussions We are witnessing an AI information CARTEL in formation⚖️
This is how websites die. Data from @pewresearch shows that Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after being presented with an AI Overview compared to result pages without one. 🔗 pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…
I think there's still more than a chance that AI is overhyped as a world-altering technology and the mega-expansion looks silly in a decade, if not sooner
How many cigarettes are you indirectly smoking due to air pollution levels? We used Berkeley Earth’s rule of thumb ( 🚬 = 22 µg/m3 PM2.5 concentration) to calculate the number of cigarettes people are indirectly smoking based on PM2.5 pollution in cities worldwide.
Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not/cannot exist as sold, there's no AI SaaS story, and everything rides/dies on selling GPUs. wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
“Our content is no longer read by people but misappropriated by all kinds of AIs and used for the profit of a handful of tech companies.” 🔗 digitalcitizen.life/google-is-kill…
If you're wondering how we're doing in the age of AI Overviews and AI Mode from @Google, here's a summary of what it's been doing to our traffic and how these products use content from independent publishers without compensating them. #AIMode #aioverviews digitalcitizen.life/google-is-kill…
Quite possibly one of the saddest — and scariest — sentences I’ve read in a while, and it’s buried in a NY Times puff piece praising AI companions for vulnerable people on the spectrum. “Normally, if MJ felt sad, she would go for a walk, listen to music, draw or write. But…
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
Rupert vs. Donald: Let Them Fight “If those two forces align - Murdoch’s media machine and Musk’s control over the social narrative - Trump doesn’t just face an Epstein crisis; he faces an apocalypse” open.substack.com/pub/therickwil…
I always thought negative seo was a myth…
Someone bought 300+ spam links and pointed them to one of our most critical air purifier reviews. The first wave came after we sent a request for comment for a new review. The second wave came the day after @linusgsebastian posted a video about the brand threatening to sue us.
Netflix is now cutting film production budgets & pushing production companies to use Generative AI to cut corners & costs. "AI tools allowed Netflix to fund the show at a much lower cost than is typical for a big-budget production." said, T. Sarandos, a Netflix co-CEO.
Ok Mustafa, prove it then! Will Microsoft AI agree to pay 'real currency' to the creators' whose content you feed to train your AI?
What is AI doing with your personal information? Stealing it. Selling it. Getting rich off it. It’s time to start protecting the American people
Artificial intelligence has undermined the internet’s central bargain economist.com/leaders/2025/0…
“What happens if/when the biggest search engine in existence decides that organic listings underneath LLM-generated answers no longer need to be there, be them hidden by a button to see them or gone completely?” 🔗 dancallisseo.com/blog/seo-marke…