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"

political situation in Gabon, where the mere possibility of a video being a deepfake created confusion and facilitated political deception, even without deepfake technology. This scenario perfectly illustrates a DoFA: the overwhelming doubt and uncertainty, fuelled by too much unverified or manipulative information, effectively 'denied' the public's ability to discern truth and respond appropriately.

It’s likely that some facsimile of Twitter will exist, far into the future. But a seismic shift in how the platform is perceived has occurred. If it isn’t good for breaking news, then what good is it? Perhaps it’s not a force for good at all.