Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

From the early days of the semantic web and web services the sales pitch featured the promise of services 'orchestration' along the lines of "plan me a seven-day vacation." So here it is again, this request that most of us will use once a year, if that. And this I think forms the basis of what may be more push-back than Google expects for its new AI-assisted search service. It wants to replace the "the 10 blue links," you see, or at least, those search results left over after the deluge of advertising, and it plans to replace them with an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs summarizing the result, three links to sites with information that 'corroborates' what's in the summary and a 'bear claw' icon that when clicked splits the summary "sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence." But this idea - "producing cheap content based on others' work" - could "damage whole swathes of the web that most of us find useful — from product reviews to recipe blogs, hobbyist homepages, news outlets, and wikis." And it's not clear we want the 10 blue links replaced.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 08:35 a.m.

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