I read an interesting and useful article in the Wall Street Journal regarding AI, “It’s the End of the Web As We Know It.”
Two action items I got from the article are 1) to try an AI-powered search called ArcSearch and 2) to try Consensus, which uses large language models for detailed summaries of research papers. The latter can offer insights about the scientific consensus on various topics and may be useful for healthcare research, among other things.
Here is a summary of the article:
Christopher Mims’s article discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on the web. AI is changing the way we search for information online, with new AI-powered “answer engines” providing direct answers instead of links to web pages. This shift could significantly alter the internet’s current ecosystem, affecting publishers, tech giants, and advertisers. The rise of AI-generated content is also polluting search results and reducing the usefulness of traditional search engines. The article explores the potential consequences of these changes, including the threat to the business models of many publishers and the challenges of maintaining trust in search results amid a surge of low-quality AI-generated content.
Carl B. Barney
March 9, 2024
AI offers some interesting challenges. The overly long copyright protection established to protect Disney’s early characters, causes a problem for building good AI “engines” since use of copyrighted material (without potentially expensive licenses) forces the information base to come from aged public domain sources. That said, my so-far small interactions with AI shows considerable promise.
Since much of the work I do involves graphics, I’ve found the AI feature offered in Adobe Photoshop quite helpful as a time saver, but it is not particularly “intelligent.”
I suspect that as time passes, these AI features will improve in quality and usefulness.