AI in SEO makes me anxious

I don’t find AI in SEO interesting or ground-breaking for the most part. The mere thought of most applications or blog posts about what you need to do as a professional conjures a dread inside me that takes at least a minute to shake off. That’s not a great feeling and it’s burgeoning form of technology in my line of work. Perhaps a bit of it is inadequacy that I have to face and remind myself that I’m very good at what I do and it’s a matter of filling a knowledge gap. But another part of me asks why I have to fill a hole at all and whether the dread comes from a moral barrier.

I don’t like this stuff. Why must I have to learn it?

I’ve said before that I enjoy natural language processing (NLP) way more than the outputs of generative AI models (I know they’re not mutually exclusive). Understanding language, finding entities and topics, creating emebeddings, working with similiarity algorithms; the machine learning stuff. Messing about with prompts is not fun and feels like uneducated guesswork.

I don’t like to move to the beat of Big Tech’s drums anymore than I already do so knowing that the rhythm is ever changing, that I don’t have the sheet music but I must follow along anyway is jarring.

I don’t know what my next step is with all of this but I know my feelings towards this won’t change with things as they are and if there is a bubble burst, I don’t know if/when there’ll be some kind of blowback that’ll affect my career.