Bruce Schneier over at Schneier on Security writes:
The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.
But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.
The internet let us all become creators. Writers. Artists. Publishers. You Name It. Content was no longer the province of gate-keeping institutions like book and music publishers, movie studios, art galleries, or libraries. Anyone and everyone had a voice. Naturally, it got a little loud.
So the folks at Google came up with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. These were things you could do to amplify your voice. The idea was that SEO would help the user to better find what they wanted. Of course the scammers were all over that and had counter-measures for everything else (like PageRank) that came their way. The result is that there is no way to know if the hits you get on your search are legit. I think we’ve all seen the shrinking range of search results over the years. And who hasn’t been frustrated by the long list of links that reference the same source? Cory Doctorow calls this degradation of quality enshittification and I think it’s a perfect word.
On the scene these days are ginormous computer programs called LLMs or Large Language Models. ChatGPT is an example of such a thing. All this stuff gets lumped under the umbrella term AI.
LLMs are fed all the data they can handle. ChatGPT is so voracious there’s talk it will run out of material to consume in a few years. Everything produced by all of us will some day be absorbed by these machines and reduced to impersonal bits.
I love a classic BLT. Bacon. Lettuce. Tomato. Toasted bread, some mustard and mayo. Yumm. But put it in a blender and turn it into a BLT Smoothie? Yeeucch.
That’s what our friends over at AI, Inc. want. They think chatbots will do a better job of managing all that information out there. And that is certainly possible if all we care about is INFORMATION. You add SEO, that, is “optimization” to LLMs, and you’ll get LLMOs. These unholy constructs will hoover up all the information in the world and customize it into any number of flavored potions. As Schneier says:
If you want to know about climate change, or immigration policy or any other contested issue, there are people, corporations, and lobby groups with strong vested interests in shaping what you believe. They’ll hire LLMOs to ensure that LLM outputs present their preferred slant, their handpicked facts, their favored conclusions.
The internet was like a flea market in the early days. Then it evolved to more like a suburban mall and soon it will be more like a cable-TV subscription. Lots of channels but not much choice. Search engines, in the early days, made it possible for people to connect with other people. Now we have AI-synthesized answers that cut people out of the equation.
That makes the internet a sterile place. Perhaps people will discover what they are missing and begin to demand (and create) an alternative.