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?
Seems like it would just feed the arms race of enshittification. It’ll help for a while until new smarter weapons arise against it, and we’re back to the same place while burning more electrons. I don’t see how it sustainably improves things
Especially since ai search summaries are still so bad. All too often the ai result is wrong or misguided or hallucinating. Maybe I just have to get better at phrasing things, which used to be critical when search was still search, but isn’t the intent that you shouldn’t have to?
I do use ai all the time and do think it’s useful, but only when keeping in mind its limitations. It can work well as a helpful step to a lot of things, but rarely as a final useful answer/result