AI is Eating Itself
Brief
Google made answers easy. AI is making us source-blind.
“Ask the chatbot and get an answer.” That sounds good until you ask where the answer came from, who created it, who verified it, who updated it. And if you don’t verify the answer, you are rolling the dice if the answer is right, wrong, or incredibly misinterpreted.
AI did not create the original open web. People did. Writers did. Researchers did. Practitioners did. Teachers did. Scientists did. Curators did. Website owners did. The open web was built by people spending time, money, experience, and judgment to make information available, shared, and improved upon.
Now AI systems scrape that information, compress it, summarize it, and hand the answer to the user before the user ever reaches the source.
Search used to work like this: Search → click → read → compare → decide.
AI changes that to this: Ask → answer.