There’s a lot of alarmism going on at the moment about the potential for AI to change the internet forever, but what if that’s a good thing?
What if our utopian vision for this incredible service was corrupted long ago and AI was used to rebuild it in a way more aligned with the original vision of the world’s information at our fingertips?
Google was founded in 1998 with the slogan ‘don’t be evil’ and with it came the innovative PageRank algorithm that made all www entries sortable and searchable from anywhere.
Fast forward to the late 2010s and Google is unrecognisable from these early ambitions. Largely due to its underlying advertising models, the company began systematically auctioning off the internet to the highest bidder and with it came some significant adverse consequences including over 90% control of global search, unchecked influence over the availability of information and an entire industry dedicated to churning out sensationalised clickbait for purely ranking purposes.
When the first broad-market AI tools began to be released in 2020, the prioritisation of customer intent became a critical success metric once again. Without an interface designed to wear down and distract us in service of ever increasing ad revenue, AI offers the ability to engage meaningfully with content again and with it comes the opportunity to refocus its creation not on the outdated incentives of old but around genuine user connection and creativity.
Digital Becca 