If you’re old enough to remember search before and after Google, you remember how good Google search was at the beginning.
Google used links to rank what to show to searchers. In the old web, before Google, every link was, in essence, an endorsement. We linked to what we thought was good, that other people should read.
It was a pristine “state of nature” system.
But the minute Google became dominant in search, everyone started manipulating links and metadata and everything else to get Google to send them more traffic. Links were no longer organic, no longer endorsements, but attempts to manipulate the algo. The more that was true, the more it became necessary to engage in “search engine optimization”, and the more algorithmic search engines sucked. Of course, Google also self-sabotaged, by trying to optimize search results so that Google would make the most money possible.
I recently read a regular traveler saying he never reads travel blogs and magazines any more, because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.
But AI is better because it’s reading all the travel blogs and magazines, sorting and summarizing. AI being better, readership is cratering, and so the blogs and magazines will slowly die off. Travel’s one of those activities where you need relatively recent information, where was great to stay years ago isn’t very helpful. So, as the blogs and magazines die, the AI’s results will slowly get worse, until they’re crap scraped from official websites of hotels, museums and other travel destinations, since that’s all that will remain.
AI, in other words, in this and other ways, many of them similar, will destroy the ecosystem required for it to be good, same as Google did.
This is “eating the seedcorn/destroying the soil’s fertility” type of stupidity. If you destroy an ecosystem you’re dependent on (and we’re all dependent on some ecosystems) then whatever you’re doing is only short term viable.
So enjoy AI as an alternative to search for now (but always check its source, because it does hallucinate) but understand this is a moment in time, a moment which is destroying what makes it possible.
Jefferson Hamilton
“I recently read a regular traveler saying he never reads travel blogs and magazines any more, because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.”
I’m not. You can’t trust what “AI” (it’s not really AI) tells you. Sure, most of the time it may be correct, but what about when it isn’t, which will happen eventually, and probably a lot more often than a human author?
Oakchair
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” —Dune
In many ways AI resembles the common propaganda scheme where those with conflicts of interests coopt a seemingly neutral third party to spread their propaganda.
Optimistically society won’t fall for it regarding AI because an AI third party elicits different emotional than humans. Pessimistically they will fall for it just like they have for the military-spy complex in the media, pharma funding the FDA, medical journals and doctors, and every other industry.
The other two primary uses of AI are to gather and analyze your data to convince you to buy shit you don’t need, and to increases sales of a product by attaching AI to it.
History keeps rhyming with itself over and over.
Facebook and company succeeded because they could cannibalize real friendships and social connection. They’ve degraded those to such a degree they now mostly rely on addiction and bandwagon effects.
Soredemos
It’s hard to degenerate when there was never much there to begin with.
At best in practice it’s a glorified autocorrect that is only useful about 50% of the time. Using it to write large blocks of prose reveals how incredibly limited and formulaic it is (maybe many people don’t notice us because of how increasingly post-literate society is becoming).
Using it for any sort of complex technical job I absolutely wouldn’t trust the end result, and in fact neither do many technical professionals; to get anything actually useful you need to carefully review and edit the work, at which point why didn’t you just have a professional write it in the first place?
It’s horrible for art, anything it makes is instantly identifiable as fake.
It can make cute short songs, because so much of pop music is lazily engineered hook choruses anyway.
A rare area where it actually is useful is upscaling and frame generation for higher frame rates in video games, where it just has to convincingly copy previous frame data. The data set is handed to it on a platter (and at low enough resolutions or frame rates it has insufficient data and shits itself).
Is ‘AI’ getting better? Well, it’s getting more refined to suck slightly less. I’m guessing there’s a very hard ceiling on what any of this tech can do.
Also at the end of the day automated algorithms aren’t artificial intelligence, even in the loosest possible sense. To call it such is marketing.
Ian Welsh
I don’t use it for writing, but I find AI far better as a search engine than Google or any of the others I’ve tried. Of course one has to check the sources, but the sources are provided, and they are usually the right sources, where with search engines the sources I need are often not provided in the first few pages. Search is essentially useless.
I’ve been told that it’s pretty good for a lot of coding tasks, too, but that’s unrelated to this post. (I haven’t confirmed, I stopped programming in 98, and am hopelessly out of date and practice.)
adrena
My physician used AI to provide a summary of our meeting
Purple Library Guy
It occurs to me that both of these problems, the search problem and the AI problem, are problems largely because the internet is being operated largely on a capitalist basis. So for instance, if websites were not largely desperate for more clicks and views so as to make some money or at least defray web hosting costs, they wouldn’t need to game the search. And again, if travel writers did not have to worry about money from traffic, a reduction of traffic from people shifting to using AI (derived from what they wrote) would not stop them from doing it, as long as there were enough readers left to feel like community.
I’ve long thought that one thing that would make the internet better would be governments offering free web hosting to any citizen who wanted it, with the proviso that they didn’t use ads. They could still sell merch, have a Patreon or whatever, but no advertising. It would cost a lot of money, but it would be worth it by reducing a host of problems and encouraging creativity.
Soredemos
I wouldn’t trust any physician, engineer, or programmer who relied on algorithms instead of just doing the damn job they’re paid to do. If I were some sort of project lead I would fire any employee I caught using it. Long term reliance on it for even annoying tedious stuff is going to atrophy actual skills.
T
“because AI is so much better. I’m sure he’s right.”
Really? Maybe Im just not recognizing the so called good AI. All I recognize as AI is so , so, so bad. It reads like a smart 4th grade kid trying to fake his way thru a book report of a book he didn’t read. So repetitive saying the same thing many different ways, always seemingly leading to a point but never delivering, wasting 20 paragraphs to say what could be said in a couple sentences.
Often it gets the question wrong and gives an irrelevant answer. It seems like it is searching thru a bunch of FAQ webpages (that you have probably already been to looking for an answer) and gives an extremely verbose non-answer.
Color me unimpressed. Your mileage may vary.