The nature of the web is changing, driven by the current AI gold rush. “Search” the gateway to the open Internet is becoming, and for many people has already become, “ask”. Ask and thou shalt receive, all the content of the web distilled by artificial minds to probabilistic summaries. Probabilities derived in a large part from all the good, bad and ugly content of the internet on which they are trained. Anyone who has spent any significant time on the web should understand why an AI trained in the uncensored filth of the Internet would hallucinate or spiral into a hate and bigotry spewing tin-foil hatted cyber-homunculus. Ask an thou shalt receive, confidently stated echo chamber reinforcing slop, as likely to be based on the barely coherent rantings of a damaged mind as knowledge from experts.
I’ve still yet to see why anyone should celebrate this. We used to think that access to knowledge was the problem. The internet put it all at our fingertips. That didn’t fix anything, in fact it seems to have made it worse. How is going from a system which required someone to actively participate in finding information —through searching and reading the results— to a system allowing passive consumption of answers presented as authoritative, accurate, complete and final, all while based on probability with no clear way to check it. I don’t doubt that technology can solve these problems, that with more time and effort this, or the next, version of AI can be made reliable and accurate. But I don’t think we are there and we rush headlong into the capitalist rush to monetize everything faster than society can adapt, marveling at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
But I digress. My personal view of the quality and usefulness of the current crop of AI was not the point of today’s rant.
I wanted to point out this article that Phi Beta Kappa posted in late October. I can’t even tell if this article is serious or satire. But either way it gets its point across:
Though it has been discussed far less than the replacement of human writers, the replacement of human readers by artificial intelligence has lately become a real possibility. In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI.
Dan Kagan-Kans, in “Baby Shoggoth Is Listening” [theamericanscholar.org], published by The American Scholar, October 29, 2025
I wonder if AI ‘reads’ my blog? I doubt it. Stats for Confusion are in the low single digits a day, at best. Mostly people who must be desperate, looking for answer on page 5 or 10 of Google results. But maybe the AI crawlers will find me one day. Should I try block all the AI crawlers? I could update the robots.txt for Confusion. But I’m not that worried yet. If the AIs want to talk like me then so be it. And anyway, as the article on Phi Beta Kappa concludes:
The most depressing reason to write for AI is that unlike most humans, AIs still read. They read a lot. They read everything. Whereas, aided by an AI no more advanced than the TikTok algorithm, humans now hardly read anything at all…
Dan Kagan-Kans, in “Baby Shoggoth Is Listening” [theamericanscholar.org], published by The American Scholar, October 29, 2025
What a sad thought. Reading is among of the most beautiful of all human endeavors. I love cinema, and video games, and I enjoy many tv shows. But the nature of reading and the infinite worlds of imagination that it opens are beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in even the most awe inspiring moving images. No Hollywood budget or FX magic could ever come close to the worlds of imagination that great authors have put into my head.
So, if I am writing for the bots, so be it. I hope they dream…