Will we browse the web in the future?
Paul has written a long well written piece on how the nature of browsing the web is changing with AI, with what we may gain efficiency we lose in agency and nuance.
But I've lost something profound in the processâthe joy of the unexpected detour. I'm not really browsing the web anymore. At best, I'm just browsing AI interpretations of a limited slice of the web. A slice that I didn't even pick or have control over. My surface area for discovery is now whatever these tools decide to show me.
One of his main points are that these tools are not transparent in how the prioritise or chose sources for the summary output we get. This is problematic as we think we may be getting a good overview of something, but it is very shallow and ultimately controlled by a few big companies.
AI answer engines make countless hidden decisions about what sources matter and what information is relevantâall without your input or awareness. You get the illusion of comprehensiveness, when in reality you're getting a narrow slice of available information filtered for you.
In addition, it also removes the joy of finding stuff yourself. Stumbling upon that niche personalized website or going off on a tangent on related topics you didnât initially thought about.
Paul suggests that a way forward could be adding more "personalizationâ into these tools, so they know more about your own context, interests and background in order to not give out generic responses, without sacrificing agency and transparency.
Providing users transparency and control in tweaking how AI interprets them is critical to seeing, reinforcing, and correcting assumptions as they go.
Personally I am probably more inclined to try and go back to basics, maybe even as far back before we actually had search engines, but curated indexes of website to explore through old fashioned links. Though on some level I think that is mostly nostalgic wishful thinking.
Because the biggest threat as I see it, is that the rising use of AI tools that basically just the browsing for you and summarize key points, will eventually just lead to websites closing off public access and go behind paywall. This is already increasingly happening and while AI companies are working on getting partnership deals with news agencies and publishers, I have a hard time imagining a prosperous future of free public knowledge sharing if it all ends up just being content fodder for the LLMs.
Originally search engines was built on sort of a social contract where websites allowed to be indexed with real user traffic in return. When that basically gets replaced with AI bots visiting your site just to give a summary, where the best you can hope for is a small footnote for a source but the AI company is getting all the profit - that is sure to dampen the incentive to even publish stuff on the web.
The counter movement to this is of course also happening, with the IndieWeb movement and this blogosphere where many of us read through RSS and link to each other websites without any sort of monetization in mind.
There are several things in motion right now, and I am sure the publicly available landscape of the web will be radically changing in the coming years as a response to the increase in âAI browsingâ.