Founded in 2013 to archive the "aesthetic awesomeness" of GeoCities websites, Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art, niche fandoms, and special expertise-or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online-Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page.
When Google's AI Overviews arrived in May 2024, search engine strategists-the specialists who make a living by getting web pages to the top of people's query results-took notice. With the implementation of Overviews, Google's first page search results, a target destination for anyone creating and optimizing content, suddenly sat below a response generated by Gemini, the company's AI engine. "Our initial reaction was, 'Well, how is it going to work in the future?'"
The visible Claude chatbot conversations included prompts from Anthropic's team for the chatbot to create apps, games and a "comedy Anthropic office simulator." Other users tasked Claude with writing a book, coding and completing corporate tasks that revealed staff names and emails. Several transcripts made users identifiable by name, or by details shared in the prompt. Google estimated that it had indexed just under 600 conversations.
Unique links are created when Grok users press a button to share a transcript of their conversation - but as well as sharing the chat with the intended recipient, the button also appears to have made the chats searchable online. A Google search on Thursday revealed it had indexed nearly 300,000 Grok conversations. It has led one expert to describe AI chatbots as a "privacy disaster in progress".