Along the way I ran into shitty research
I get about 200 emails a day in my Pocketables email pitching me various gadgets, books, Turtle Rescues for some reason, telco updates, etc. I have subscribed to a total of 1 of these emails and the rest are the result of various companies putting me into a list they sell to various buyers who are told I am interested in their verticals.
TL;DR – short blog on fake research used for SEO
And for the most part they’ve been pretty on brand…
Recently I started getting expert commentary from, I’m going to say, not experts. At least not experts in their fields currently.
The format is the same – some interesting piece of commentary on how your air purifier is going to kill you or that charging your phone overnight will burn your house down and about a page and a half of text that could be generated by ChatGPT and contains the wisdom of 2006 without any of the collective learnings of the past 18 years.
I caught my local news station using one of them the other day, a fairly innocuous tidbit I’d passed on because it wasn’t phones, gadgets, or anything to catch my attention. A shout out to the source was mentioned and amused me they hadn’t checked it, or were ok sourcing an online casino ranking website as a researcher.
But the format is the same, research, some text, claiming someone’s an expert and if you use their research link to them. The researchers tend to be casinos and gambling sites, web developers looking to increase their SEO, personal injury lawyers, and other people known for their researching capabilities.
The findings presented are generally in the format of the articles that ruined the internet in 2012 with the methodology maybe mentioned but no table data given or links to where the data was pulled, and that would be all right if everything were correct… but it’s not usually.
It’s never done by firms that specialize in research… never…
So yeah, if you see “a new study has revealed…” or “a cell phone expert on why you should/shouldn’t” maybe bear in mind a lot of these are now the result of asking ChatGPT to study something and then comment on it, and they were not checked for validity because the expert producing them is not an expert in that field.
