Work

Literary Hypertext, AI, and Google’s New Web: An Aesthetics Discussion

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: At the end of 2024, Google released a significant update to the guidelines for their quality ranking. Positioning is now based on "content appropriateness" defined by four main user intents: informational, transactional, navigation, localisation. The language of these guidelines at times feels like a nostalgic call to a utopian web not realised: in its repudiation of SEO tactics, its emphasis on information and knowledge creation, its focus on expertise and original content. We offer a speculative exploration of what a future web might look like, with an eye to particular forms of hypertext. This study afforded the opportunity to explore Google’s AI Gemini. Used as a proxy for the new AI engines implementing these ranking guidelines, we evaluate its ability to understand hypertext narrative. The paper provides two fully developed case studies, as well as a novel methodology to evaluate the AI’s understanding of a more creative future web.

Source: ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT)

DOI: 10.1145/3720553.3746678

Authors: Alessio Antonini, Lucia Lupi, Mariusz Pisarski, Sam Brooker

Institutions: The Open University, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, University of the Arts London

Language: English

Topic: Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

OpenAlex ID: W4413612767

FWCI: 6.517

Cites: 11

Cited by: 5

Related to: 10