I’ve been working on a horn related writing project off and on these several weeks. Occasionally I’ll do searches. Most of the time, out of habit, I’ll use Google Chrome. The current version of this will give you as the first result an “AI Overview.”
Horn Matters is number one
First, I do want to sincerely thank anyone reading this far into this article. I’m going to assume a lot of you are people who have been fans of Horn Matters for a while, the leading online resource on the French horn. Thank you for visiting!
The deep thought I’m having, and I don’t know what to think about it really, is that in pretty much every topic related to the horn I’m seeing Horn Matters content in the Google AI results. It’s kind of startling for me personally. They credit Horn Matters there, so that’s fine, I guess. Our content is all on the public Internet, and has been crawled by every search engine many times. And we keep the site updated, etc.
As I write this I have 1018 articles posted on Horn Matters. So — I guess the horn AI output almost has to mirror my thoughts. And of course, Bruce Hembd has 545 articles in the site; his thoughts are right there, too. We have many more horn articles online than anyone else.
This is, by the way, the third time I’ve personally had over 1,000 articles on Horn Matters. There’s an article about this here, but in short I hit 1,000 in 2012 and again 2016, but both times did some major editing on the site and cut things back. I may do that again this summer too. Some old content is timeless, but other old content has to be removed from time to time.
But back to my main topic, the strange thing for me is
Reading my words, as processed by AI
I amused myself at one point yesterday by typing into Google questions that mirrored topics of articles I had posted in Horn Matters. That was interesting, to see my words processed and given back to me by AI. They were kind of my words, I can pick out my thoughts easily enough, and again the AI gives credit to Horn Matters — but its just strange to see things I wrote processed and combined with the thoughts of others.
One way to look at this is I’ve been given a unique glimpse behind the curtain of how Google AI generates results. Giving me a version of my own words back, words that were the product of a lot of effort and study of the topic of all things French Horn.
I ran some of this by Bruce Hembd, and he added a point that was one I was having trouble articulating. Even with giving credit to Horn Matters, this does begin to feel like the AI is stealing/plagiarizing.
What a time saver for horn players!
And of course, with the AI providing the answer right there, you don’t even need to click through to the underlying source articles. Who’s got time to read?
Fortunately, site stats show that people (I’ll call them smart people) still click through to the real articles. And, thankfully, horn playing itself is an analog activity, and a wonderful activity. Time to practice.
