Well now, here’s a really good one: AI Search Engines and the Quest for Ignorance.

“In 2021, Twitter introduced a feature prompting users to consider reading news articles before retweeting them. Through their link tracking, they’d found that an overwhelming number of users would repost articles without having even visited the url.”

For all my pious blogger recommendations about triangulating sources, folks are no longer reading anything other than the titles of posts. Upworthy and their methods of testing/sensationalizing titles to attract clicks has become the be-all and end-all of reinforcing belief systems of online seekers of information. Many news services cycle through multiple titles now to grab eyeballs, with increasingly misleading ledes.

Read the whole thing. ChatGPT - as it exists right now - poses some alarming scenarios for our collective futures. Google and others are racing to compete.

The internet and AI had such rosy futures predicted. Instead, the quest for greenbacks is giving us another hammer to whack ourselves in the forehead with. Education is more important than ever in our history, and it’s under lethal attack in America.

Seatbelts. If you don’t have yours on, clip it now. I’m trying not to despair, but the more I read the news, the more depressed I get. Give some of our more idiotic politicians access to a Fox News directed $500,000 ChatGPT instance (you can purchase the software, and aim it at a specific pool of info), and just wait for brain-melting revelations.

Mastodon, in my initial forays, has been a joy, by the way. Can’t get any traction, but I’m enjoying the people I’m finding to read. A different feel/vibe than Twitter. I feel infinitely more informed about things I’m actually interested in. Curate your follows carefully, you may also have a good experience. I’m on mstdn.social, at the ‘usual’ username.