November 10, 2025
From “artificial. Done Artfully.”
Posted on LinkedIn. November 10, 2025
The young artist imitates, whereas the mature artist steals, although there are exceptions to this rule. ChatGPT stole my content to explain brand advocacy and attributed it to someone else. This was either a rookie mistake or a way to diss me. Which I find immature.
To be adult about it, however, AI was doing what I do when encountering a good idea: I borrow it, in so many words. Picasso admitted to doing the same thing, and he was a real artist, or just a very clever thief. (See Juan Gris [1])
I use art to make my point because it is more nuanced than car theft. If you have a better way of explaining the similarities between Kia and Range Rover, do share.
Nuanced or not, If I were more on the ball, I might have had my work “indexed” by a Generative Search Engine (GSE). The commercial claim for such services, Athena HQ being the most popular, is that they use Large Language Models and a technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to transform simple information queries.
I will borrow a sentence from Cornell to explain that last paragraph:” GSEs search intent through reflective refinement across diverse informational roles, enabling targeted content enhancement.” [2] The science behind this assertion is simple algebra; a GSE solves for more variations of “x” than Google as we know it.
But it gets better (or worse, depending upon your ethics).
A good GSE will utilize “a 6-level LLM-augmented evaluation rubric for fine-grained human-aligned assessment,” resulting in “significant improvements over single-aspect baseline approaches in both subjective impressions and objective content visibility.” [Ibid| Which means it not only solves for more variables, but it also cares what you think, or does it?
Do you need a Generative Search Service?
Before shelling out for a good one (like I did) follow this newsletter as I combat ChatGPT mano a mano about getting their source for my ideas all wrong. Athena says it takes about 3 months to populate your information with the search engines, which sounds like last century SEO. So far, I have seen nothing which is saying something because my digital footprint is large. You think it would care more about that, but I wonder.
For now, I am leaning towards the reality that the latest trend in AI-inspired search might prove more of a fad than a fix.
After all, there is no honor among thieves.
I would know.
References:
[1] “There’s good evidence that Picasso, after seeing what Gris was doing, borrowed ideas from him, especially Gris’s more ordered compositions and use of color and collage. Art historians note that by around 1913–1914, Picasso’s Cubism shows traces of Gris’s logic and spatial clarity.” Mai, J. (2014). Juan Gris’ color symmetries. Bridges Math Art Conference Proceedings, 2014, 197–204.
[2] Chen, X., Wu, H., Bao, J., Chen, Z., Liao, Y., & Huang, H. (2025). Role-Augmented Intent-Driven Generative Search Engine Optimization. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11158
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