Not by me, I hasten to add. No. This is by Google, which thinks that I am interested in [checks notes] Travel And Tour World.
Actually, the only reason I am interested in Travel And Tour World is because of their bizarre SEO-grabbing headlines.
Headlines like:
or:
Mmm… catchy. It really does seem to be the aim to get as many countries into one headline as possible, but this policy then really does limit the amount of extra information that is shared in the actual article. Because you’ve already given us the whole story in the headline.
I love the “all the other countries in the Caribbean” bit here. Mentioning six by name clearly wouldn’t be enough for the reader to get the gist of the story, but mentioning eight? Ridiculous.
Seven, it is. We can easily just lump the rest of them…
There are 13 sovereign countries in the Caribbean, along with approximately 12 to 13 dependent territories (such as Puerto Rico and the Cayman Islands) that belong to the U.S., UK, France, and the Netherlands.
… together. We’ve name-checked all the important ones.
Attached to each of these “articles” is an AI-generated image (of course). And they range from the somewhat unlikely:
All sorts of maritime rules and regulations being broken here. Including that ship with the wake coming out of the bow.
Right through to the downright apocalyptic:
I’m fairly sure that it’s not looking quite that bad in all of the Middle East at the moment. But if you are there and you see a massive yellow suitcase, run.
OK, ok… Calm your tits, mate. Passenger numbers are down a bit because of rising fuel costs. It’s an economic matter.
That doesn’t mean that the stern section of your cruise liner is going to explode. What sort of prompt did you stick into Chat GPT for this nonsense to come out of its rear end? And once you’d done that, why did you think that it was a good idea to publish it?
I’ve switched off suggestions for Travel And Tour World now, because it’s clearly just an AI-generated travel “news” site designed to produce lots and lots of really poor-quality copy with the aim of selling adverts.
A bit like this blog, except I write it and it’s basically advert free.
But the copy bit? Absolutely.