Status-Q

  Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime.  

Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer… I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy.  So I did a quick search to see if others had the same experience, and I got this page back as one of the top hits:

I quote: “Nowadays, there are so many products of dualit toaster timer keeps sticking in the market and you are wondering to choose a best one.”

There’s a danger that we may soon move past the time of useful online search — Peak Google, if you like — and the alternative approach of trying to ask questions of an AI will only make things worse, since studies have already shown that training AIs on AI-generated content quickly leads to madness (for the AIs, that is, not the users, though that too would probably follow soon afterwards). 

So making the most of online content in the future may depend, more than ever before, on being able to ensure that it comes from a trusted human source.  Who’s old enough to remember when the web was small enough that human-generated indexes were the best way to find things?

But this is also why, as John Naughton nicely reminds us in an Observer piece this weekend, the best human-generated and human-curated content out there is often available via your RSS reader, not your search engine.  (I happen to like News Explorer, and have used it for a few years.)

RSS — a system for telling you when your favourite sites, especially blogs, have been updated without you needing to go and look at each one every day — has existed since long before Facebook and these other trendy things now called ‘social networks’ existed, and I suspect will still be around after they’ve gone.  But if RSS doesn’t appeal for some reason, much of the best content — including, of course, John’s blog and this one — is also available via an even more time-tested channel.  Your email inbox.