Bad spelling good, Gemini on the march, and Elon vs Sam

This week's Content Aware brings you more AI shenanigans, newsroom metrics that matter, and Apple's search engine no

Published: 18:13, 02 January 2025

It aint easy not being a bot
The AIs are starting to look like they don't need us anymore, and the only thing which marks you out as a human might be the things you've trained yourself not to do - like misspell things. Glide's most prodigious user of the backspace key looks at the rise of authenticity in a robot-written world.
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Apple rules out search play
Buried in the details of festive filings in the USA vs Google court case is an attestation from Apple that it has no plans to build its own search engine. Apple, which earns $20bn a year from a deal with Google, is strongly against a bar to the two companies pallying up - and perhaps hints that it wants to do a similar deal for AI presets on iPhones. Ricky Sutton investigates!
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Brace yourself for Gemini overload
The fight is on for Google to put the ChatGPT cat back in the bag and get its Gemini AI product in front of everyone it can in 2025. Which means you should expect to see Gemini ads, Gemini branding, and Gemini tools butting into your day every time you go near a Google product.
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Searchengineland bonus: Their Top 10 SEO advice columns of 2024.

"I’m just a link in generative AI’s content supply chain."
The ever vigilant Graham Lovelace's great interview with an academic author whose work was bundled into an AI deal by her publishers, which perfectly captures the dilemma facing those who create original knowledge in the era of AI models. It also prompts thinking on the outdated nature of pre-LLM era contracts between creators and publishers.
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Musk vs Altman case gets a notable supporter
Nobellist and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton had an interesting end to 2025: first, he ramped up his prediction that AI will contribute to the demise of humanity within the next few decades. Then, he joined forces with, err... Elon Musk, in opposing the move by OpenAI to become a fully profit-driven entity. What did you do over the holidays?
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AI: a tool to dig your own backyard
A pragmatic look at the power of AI for publishers to turn old unloved archive and legacy content into something spring fresh and ready to pay its way again.
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If the metaphor fits, share it
Good writing isn't accidental, and sometimes it takes a village to craft that just-right description or analogy. A reminder that when we're done tweaking text for SEO, it helps if it's also a good read despite what the algorithm says.
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The metrics that matter (today)
As more newsrooms look at time-on-site as a key performance indicator, caution arrives in the form of guidance that it can be a deceptive metric weak in comparison to other stats such as article completion rates and reader feedback. Dr Dietmar Schantin investigates for INMA.
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ICYMI: The worldwide AI regulation landscape
Keep up to speed on who is doing what to regulate AI and legislate its relationship with users and creators by bookmarking The Creative Rights Alliance's blueprint of global AI regulation. Although an authority on the area of creative rights and entertainment law, the CRI report also looks at wider implications to legislate AI in spheres such as defence, healthcare, and transport.
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