AI could provide some minor deshitification of the internet by answering obvious questions implied by clickbaity titles. In other words, comb the link and pop up, in simplest terms, what a title baits you with.
For instance, a browser plugin that could pop up a balloon showing “It’s Portland, Oregon” when you hover your mouse over “One US city likes its food carts more than any other”. Or “Tumbling Dice” when you hover over “The Stones’ song that Mick Jagger hates to sing”. Even give “Haggle over the price and options” on the classic clickbait “Car dealers don’t want you to know this one trick!”. All without you having to sift through pages of crap filler text (likely AI generated) and included ads to satisfy trivial curiousity you might be baited by.
I wouldn’t even mind too much if the service collected and sold the fact that I did (or didn’t) get curious about the related topics. It would still be fewer ads in the face overall. So maybe monetizing like that could motivate someone to develop a service?
Or would that just make the net worse?
Still don’t feel like we could trust it to not just hallucinate or fail to understand the article properly
Trust in journalistic integrity is gone anyway, when everything’s an opinion piece rather than an actual news report.
My favourite is reading an article on a subject you’re an expert in and evaluating its (in)accuracy, then entirely forgetting about that when reading any others.
It’s all click bait all the way down.
Does it matter? You don’t want hallucinations to screw up understanding of a scholarly or technical article or where it’s critical to be right, but surfing the internet? “News” and opinion? Entertainment? What’s the likelihood of any misunderstanding having an actual impact, and can it be any worse than today’s clickbait headlines?
If I Google “BBC News” and then mouse over a headline in search results about some world event, I think it is important that the AI isn’t just hallucinating and making up a summary out of whole cloth.
We’ve seen AI summaries already really; Google has them in search results. We’ve seen them advise using glue on pizza, for instance.
Funny enough, I just saw a bunch of headlines about Apple and their AI that summarises news headlines. Lots of unhappy customers, because it doesn’t work.