We are losing control of our information input
The Internet is the source of all information. Almost. I bet that you only on rare occasions try to find information elsewhere?
Maybe you have a large encyclopedia on your bookshelves? Or some bilingual dictionaries for the different languages you have been in touch with? Travel guides? Phone books?
Whatever is there, on the bookshelves, is probably just collecting dust. Because you feel that you can find all the same information faster and easier, and more up-to-date, by a simple Internet search. You may use the Google search page, like 99% of other people, or you may be a bit of a rebel, using DuckDuckGo, Qwant, or Startpage – the list of options, according to Wikipedia, is long – which may affect the result a bit.
But two factors then have a huge influence on what you will find:
- Who collected the information, and why?
- What is the provider trying to gain from giving you the information?
And you will find, when checking these questions, that it’s all about the money. These providers are either trying to take out a subscription fee from you, or earn money on your searches by collecting data about those too, and using all the data to sell advertisements – often as a bigger package with information they have collected about you from several other places as well.
What they don’t care about, really, is if you get the most up-to-date and relevant information. Those who wrote your dust-collecting paper-based encyclopedia made a huge effort to collect what they considered correct and relevant information in just the right amount to fit into the context, and by that, you could trust that most of the contents was, at least, meant to be useful to you. Of course, you might have different needs in a particular situation, so that you’ll have to supplement with information from other books, but the encyclopedia was thought to be a good starting point for many information searches.
Wikipedia was, and is, an idea that continued in the same direction, except that the information there is crowdsourced, so it contains what a large amount of all kinds of people knew and were willing to tell about – and which they could document through links to credible sources. Of course, what is credible is a matter of definitions, but these exist as well in the Wikipedia universe, so you will find a coherent experience throughout most of this huge collection of information.
Still, Wikipedia doesn’t contain all information you might want to find. For instance, people who are not (very) famous, and small companies, and all such information that is considered of limited interest to most people, will not be accepted on Wikipedia.
So, you will tend to use one of those search engines from before – maybe altogether instead of Wikipedia, because you don’t want to spend time looking and then not finding, and with the search engines, you’ll almost always get a response. And they will provide you with something that suits their needs – hence, even if they can’t find exactly what you are looking for, they’ll give you something else, just to keep the machine running, to generate the information flow they earn their money on.
Now people are getting tired of this. Not because they don’t trust the results from the search engines, which would have been a valid reason, but because they don’t want to spend time on gathering information from several sites, out of those the results link to, into the complete package of information needed. So, they have started asking AI.
It is really strange that generative AI, which, as the name says, is good at making things up, is being trusted as a source of information. But it is so. I guess that many users of AI for this purpose actually know that the output is somewhat unreliable, but as it looks good and is without comma-errors, they find that they can use it anyway – their readers will probably not notice that half of it is free imagination (or hallucination, as it is called in the AI universe).
These people are deliberately producing crap. But other people see what they do and try to imitate it – and they may believe that it can be trusted. So, the informed serve as a very poor example for the unknowing.
While this trend is going up and becoming big these days, it is quite amazing to see that we already meet its opposition. Sometimes, this happens with new trends – it is going too fast for some, so they object. But along the way, also they will surrender, and we will see a shift at a large scale in society. But I’m not so sure that it is this situation now, with the AI search trend, because the criticism often comes from experts in AI, or from people who are already using AI for various things. These people have qualified opinions about the matter.
They do speak for an ignorant audience, though, when some of the people they talk to know themselves how bad it all is but don’t care, so that they are deliberately doing the wrong thing, and the others have chosen to follow exactly them, so they are doing the wrong thing because they trust the wrong people. In a company, for instance, the top management might be excited about the use of AI for everything, because they believe that it will earn them money. These are the people who don’t care about quality – they can see, that if they can produce twice as much with half the employees, they will earn more money. So be it, if the quality is worse – money talks!
And their followers are, of course, those who want to have a job. They are willing to agree to almost anything, especially when the firings have already started – those, the top management expected to see due to AI. Getting or keeping a job could then easily mean that you have to accept some idiotic decisions, based on a wrong understanding. And accept to produce poor quality work, since this is what time permits when half the staff is to do twice the work. There will be no time, and no people, to do any quality check on the output from the AI.
And, of course, this article is about search, so this might not be the main reason for companies firing people due to AI – but it’s part of it. The AI can present the found results shaped as a nice PowerPoint, or an Excel sheet, so that the time you would otherwise spend on making those things can be saved. And before long, it will be required from you – you can’t do all the work expected from you, if you insist on doing such things by hand.
People, who are not hit by the phenomenon at work, still flirt with it privately. For instance, an aspiring writer, who never really writes anything, may feel inclined to ask the AI to write them a novel – and then publish it under their own name. Generated pictures have already taken over the Internet, even though you can still find a hard core of real photographers who actually go out, like in the Stone Age, and shoot the motive with a physical camera. Most people either get one of those real photos for free from a “free photo site”, or they ask the AI to generate something for them. The latter seems to be taking over, because the free stock photos, even though there are many of them available, all have been used so many times that you can’t, anymore, impress anyone by providing them.
AI is also writing posts for social media, and comments, and sometimes it is set up so that the AI will write and publish things, and other AIs will comment on them. We don’t need any people in the process anymore, and, actually, you could easily find whole conversations on seemingly popular posts that are all AI generated.
Also students use AI for writing their homework, and some of them are even proud of being skilled in doing that. They will fit well into the above-mentioned companies, if there are any jobs left to get, when they are done with their studies.
And this is where the criticism start appearing.
During the last few days, I have seen newspaper articles and private blog articles tell about how we become more and more stupid, since we are not being trained to think anymore, or that we are loosing important skills regarding information search and evaluation.
And both are true. We loose on it. We become more and more dependent on the machines, just like we have become dependent on other machines before – cars, instead of our feet, leading to everything being further away from each other, so that we no longer could go by foot if we wanted. And calculations by pocket calculators, later computers or apps on the phone, making it common to calculate bigger things ad-hoc, instead of making some kind of planned and documented work out of it. Or that old idea of using machine-woven fabric instead of home-knitted for socks and sweaters.
In some cases, we lost some of our skills, collectively speaking. There may still be some people left who know the old craftsmanship, but mostly, we don’t care, because we can now buy cheaper socks. Same with many other things – we just see it as an advancement of humanity, into a higher level, now having tamed technology into assisting us, so that we ourselves can relax.
But it may be different this time. So far, all new technological inventions have been done by humans. We could do it, because we had a need to do it, and, hence, we kept studying and practicing the thinking within science, engineering, and other disciplines, so that we today have a huge pool of brainpower that can find solutions to all problems.
But this new trend it goes against the very foundation for the development, as it has been until now, through thousands of years. Now, we stop thinking. We stop learning. We stop inventing.
And worst of all: we stop even trying to learn how to do those things.
It is bad that novels are written by AI, and music generated by other AI, and everything around us being done by AI – in a bad quality, and all just to earn money. Bad, indeed.
But it’s a complete disaster, that we are now heading toward a world where none of us are capable of thinking. It means, essentially, that we will be unable to change the direction, ever, in the future. We are doomed. Things will become as the machines will make them, because nobody else will be able to think out any alternative.
Farming did this to the livestock long ago. They hardly know how to survive anymore on their own. They just stay there, being fed, given a roof, having the floor around them cleaned, and then they are being milked, butchered, or whatever, and they have never, along the way during their lives, had to think about what they were doing.
People are becoming like that now, due to AI. We loose our abilities, all of them, to do and think what so far has brought us forward. Meaning, there will be no forward from now on, unless the machines somehow decide on something suitable for us. But will it then be our future? Or the machines’?
