- Feb 2024
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself. If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized? If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects"
Broderick: https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult, Anderson: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
AI search hides the authors of the material it presents, summarising it is abstracting away the authors. It doesn't bring readers to those authors, it just presents a summary to the searcher as end result. Take it or leave it. At the same time, if one searches for something you know about, you see those summaries are always of. Leaving you guessing how of it is when searching something you don't know about. Search should never be the endpoint, always a starting point. I think that is my main aversion against AI search tools. Despite those clamoring 'it will get better over time' I don't think it will easily because the tool nor its makers have any interest in the quality of output necessarily and definitely can't assess it. So what's next, humans factchecking AI output. Why not prevent bs at its source? Nice ref to Maggie Appleton's centipede metaphor in [[The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI]]
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- Jul 2021
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stop.zona-m.net stop.zona-m.net
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Broad recycle of Tim Bray's article https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory with an example of the same effect for their site.
DuckDuckGo has a better index that doesn't prioritize for "right now" or currency.
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- Aug 2020
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socialsciences.nature.com socialsciences.nature.com
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Research, B. and S. S. at N. (2020, May 25). Imagining a different online world. Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Research. http://socialsciences.nature.com/users/397838-philipp-lorenz-spreen/posts/imagining-a-different-online-world
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covid-19.iza.org covid-19.iza.org
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Public Attention and Policy Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved July 31, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13427/
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