Much has been published about AI’s potential effects on us. I myself have written about how AI undermines both our ability to agree on what’s real and true and our aesthetic sensibilities, among other things. But Alan Noble recently noted another concern with AI’s growing ubiquity: its effect on our curiosity. And in particular, he questions the effects of Google’s new approach to search results, which promotes AI-generated summaries rather than simply pointing you to relevant sites.
In the past, Google didn’t give you
answersto your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and — most important to this article — sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wroteThe Old Man and The Seabut you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questionsdirectly,cutting out the path of exploration?
More:
When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we
knewto look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us todiscoverinteresting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.
To be sure, the process that Noble describes in that first quote is far from efficient. There are times when an AI-generated summary is, in fact, more useful (even after taking everything it says with a few grains of salt). Case in point: Earlier this week, my wife had an issue with her laptop that prevented her from working, and Google’s summaries did make it easier to troubleshoot and ultimately fix it. Back in the good ol’ days, who knows how much more time I would’ve spent sifting through Reddit, Stack Overflow, and various support forums to find the solution?
That said, Noble’s point is still worth considering, because efficiency isn’t the be-all and end-all, nor should it be.
One of my very favorite things to do as a kid was to sit down in front of a set of encyclopedias and just lose myself in them. I’d begin with one topic (usually something airplane or space-related) and just start leapfrogging from term to term, volume to volume, with no real goal in mind other than embracing my curiosity and reading whatever I could find about, well, whatever. It was far from efficient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was simply to learn about new things and/or dig deep into my pet topics.
When I discovered the nascent World Wide Web in 1995, just a few short years after it became publicly available, I once again felt like that kid sitting down in front of his family’s World Book set, with their maroon bindings and gold lettering. Clicking from one link to the next, and the next one after that, felt like jumping from volume to volume, only more so. Indeed, that was the web’s great promise, that we’d now have unfettered access to the world’s information, with no gatekeepers standing in our way. The web contained information on countless topics that World Book editors would never deem worthy of their pages, and it was all just waiting to be discovered.
I realize I’m painting a pretty rosy picture of things. Heaven knows there’s always been plenty of salacious, hateful, and misleading stuff on the web, and we’d all be better off as a species if it’d never been uploaded in the first place. But that doesn’t detract from the incalculable amount of good content out there, just waiting to be discovered. And once upon a time, Google was an invaluable tool for discovering it. But Noble’s right to worry that those days are coming to an end, with efficiency (and advertising dollars) now trumping curiosity and discovery:
Google AI summaries are not the end of curiosity by themselves. But they are part of a larger trend in our society to circumvent our imaginative exploration and efficiently answer our questions so we can keep the world moving toward consumption and production.
For the time being, it’s still possible to circumvent Google’s AI-centric search results, though I’m not sure how much longer Google will continue to allow an old-school search experience. But we should all enjoy it while it lasts, and let our curiosity and imagination run free in ways that no AI-generated summary can ever satisfy. Furthermore, we should take advantage of tools and platforms that encourage random discovery, be it website directories or good ol’ webrings. Opus? Want to support my writing? Become a subscriber for just
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