You go to Google to screen out irrelevant information and to reliably focus on the output of Googles information processing system. This gives Google exclusive access to the most precious resource, which is your attention. And since they have your attention, they can sell your attention to interested parties. - The Sirens' Call - Chris Hayes Pg 171
This point sticks out to me regularly, or did at least when I still used Google as my search engine. The ads getting in the way of the results I was really looking for has had me switch my search engine to Kagi which I pay for, mostly to reclaim my attention and get better search results than Google has been providing for a few years now.
The other alternative I use is ChatGPT which gives me explanations that I can verify by asking it to cite it's sources. Yes I do take the steps needed to check out at least some of the sources if the information is important enough. But ChatGPT, and all LLM's rub me the wrong way. They stole my content and then charge me for the output of that content, and they know that if they had to pay for content their business model doesn't work. The reality is for OpenAI that they want to be able to take content without paying, yet complain when others steal their models without compensation.
Kind of a do as I say, not as I do thing going on. Oh and the rules only apply to others, American tech firms should be able to take any content they want.
Which leads to Hayes later point in Chapter 6:
Almost any technology that's good at screening information to preserve our attention is also going to be good at generating things that attempt to capture and exploit our attention. - The Sirens' Call - Chris Hayes Pg 183
AI is great at filtering out the fluff in searches and getting me to a workable answer, then explaining to me why the answer works, but it's also great at generating shitty content that can then clutter up later searches with crap that's going to waste my time. Much like Yertle, it's AI can easily end up with turtles all the way down. AI feeding content to other AI's who are consuming content and then spitting out more shitty content.
All this means that curation is going to be a key element of finding worthwhile content to interact with. We're going to need to find the few people that curate our interests well and see what they find interesting, maybe do some curation ourselves to help others that share our interests find content that's worthwhile for them.
I'm not confident that LLM's will be able to do this long-term as they race and battle each other to weed out irrelevant content, while also generating dumb shit designed to fool LLM's into thinking it's relevant.
