Stripping the web of its humanity

Talking about the newly released Arc Search, Ben Werdmuller says:

A world where everyone uses an app like this is a death spiral to an information desert.

We built the world’s most incredible communication and knowledge-sharing medium, rich with diverse perspectives and alternative ideas; let’s not sanitize it through a banal filter that is designed to strip it of its humanity.

– Ben Werdmuller, in Stripping the web of its humanity

I agree with Ben's sentiment here. As flashy and interesting on surface as these AI tools are, they usually bring their own bunch of problems. And they're also symptoms of even bigger problems: the apparent need to summarize web content is a result of how much filler content there is, usually just as a manner of improving SEO and being able to show more ads to more people. It's content written by robots for robots (search engine bots), now being read by robots and summarized in a few bullet points. Where's the human in that?

I am a user of GitHub Copilot and love the tool, so I'm not totally against this latest wave of AI tools. But as of now, there are only a few use cases where I see a net positive for us in the end.

Today, I limited a bunch of AI bots' access to my website's content. Probably won't do any difference, as there's a lot of similar content to scrap out there. And the thing that makes my content mine, the human part of this, wasn't going to be used by them anyway. I guess it's just a way of me yelling at the clouds that the internet I want to see is not the one they're trying to build.