Remember the good old days of the internet? You'd type a query into a search bar and get a list of blue links, a digital breadcrumb trail leading you on an adventure. You might click a link, then another, and another, falling down a rabbit hole of information and stumbling upon something wonderfully unexpected. That experience of exploration and discovery is rapidly changing, and the culprit is Artificial Intelligence.
The New Search Experience: AI at the Helm
If you've used a search engine recently, you've seen it. Instead of just a list of links, you're often greeted with a neat, AI-generated summary at the very top of the page, promising a direct answer to your question. As Ashley Gold, a senior tech and policy reporter at Axios, puts it, "They're having the internet explain to them through AI summaries, through chatbots." This shift means we're no longer exploring the web ourselves; we're having it curated and explained to us by a machine.
On the surface, this is the pinnacle of convenience. Why sift through articles when an AI can do it for you? But this convenience comes with a hidden cost, stripping away some of the human element of discovery and, more worryingly, raising questions about the reliability of information.
The Problem with Trust and Sources
One of the cornerstones of good journalism and research is citing your sources. You need to know who is telling you something and why you should trust them. While AI summaries often include links to their sources, they aren't always prominent. The average person sees the summary, gets their answer, and moves on without ever clicking through to verify the information or see the original context.
This can lead to some... interesting results. During an interview with NPR, host Steve Inskeep did a quick search for his guest, Ashley Gold. The AI confidently informed him that she was a different person entirely! While a humorous hiccup, it highlights a serious flaw: AI can get things wrong. Without users actively checking sources, misinformation can spread more easily.
A Catastrophe for Creators
This lack of click-throughs is creating what Gold describes as a "catastrophic situation" for online publishers, news organizations, and creators. For years, their business model has revolved around Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—crafting content that ranks high in search results to attract visitors to their websites.
Now, AI is using their carefully researched information to generate summaries, but it's keeping the traffic for itself. People get the answer from the summary and never visit the source website. This means less traffic, less ad revenue, and less incentive for creators to produce high-quality content. It's a paradox: the AI needs human-generated content to create its summaries, but its very existence is threatening the ecosystem that produces that content.
Are We Making the Internet Dumber?
If there's less incentive to publish reliable, in-depth information online, the quality of the AI's source material will inevitably decline. This could lead to a downward spiral, making the internet as a whole less reliable and, well, dumber.
Beyond that, there's a human cost. By relying on AI to do our thinking and summarizing for us, we exercise our own critical thinking skills less. We lose the practice of evaluating sources, connecting disparate ideas, and forming our own conclusions. As Gold notes, "The AI summaries - they're doing the thinking for a lot of people... and that's going to have effects over time."
Key Takeaways
- A New Paradigm: AI-driven summaries are fundamentally changing the internet search experience from one of exploration to one of explanation.
- The Joy is Gone: The element of human discovery and falling down informational "rabbit holes" is being replaced by machine-curated answers.
- Trust is an Issue: AI summaries can be inaccurate, and their design discourages users from verifying sources, potentially eroding information quality.
- Publishers are Hurting: Content creators are losing traffic and revenue, which could reduce the amount of quality information available online.
- Cognitive Cost: Over-reliance on AI to find answers may weaken our own critical thinking and research skills over the long term.