Questions – including and perhaps especially “stupid” questions (i.e. ones you could answer on your own, but choose to reach out for an answer to from others regardless) are a pretty core part of the Internet experience for me.
While I have remained what oldheads might call a lurker for most of my life, I do occasionally send a ping out into the marvelous series of tubes we communicate with to see what human response comes back. This could be a question about how to prepare chicken for my cat, or how to fix a particularly stubborn bug with the software I use for work, or it could be something as open-ended as “this bit of a video game I like was particularly fascinating – did it remind anyone else of this part of a book I also enjoyed?”
Even as early as 2008-ish (when I was first discovering the wonders of the open Internet), there were answers – in-depth, varied answers from a multitude of perspectives – available for most of the questions I had to ask. And in the rare cases where I could not find responses to my queries and rationale for the answers in the same place (niche hobby forums, Yahoo answers, comments sections for software tutorials), I could place the question myself (anonymously, of course; I was fastidious about internet safety then in a way the modern corporate panopticon simply does not allow these days).
Yet it is not entirely nostalgia that makes me so damn angry to see corporate interests overinvested in AI replacing the conversational search style of “anybody know why my salamander prefers waxworms over other foods?” with sophisticated chatbot interactions. By “asking” ChatGPT, you are actively depriving yourself of the strange and wonderful sort of community that is built on asking questions of other human beings. Your chatbot will give you an answer. But it cannot bring the weight of human experience with it.
A single, narrow, often incorrect and always slanted human account of experience is something you cannot, even with coaching and prompt engineering, get out of a bot that essentially manufactures Opinion Hotdogs out of the differentiated tissues of the Internet.
This is a loss. But it is one we do not have to accept. The less you use generative AI in your daily life – to answer questions, to write emails, to substitute for the vital human work of creation – the more desperate you make the people trying to force this destructive set of technologies into every corner of your life.
By turning to your neighbor for opinion and collaboration, you starve genAI of air. So consider doing more of that.
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