Sparks: AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI - and reliable information is getting harder to find
Four of my confirming sources now draw from a single summarising instrument, and no provenance note records what that instrument observed or under what conditions - future disagreement has nothing to settle it by.
Trace the demand for free information to its origin and you find not generosity but the herd's appetite for consumption without payment; now the feeders barricade the trough, and both sides call the sickness health.
Watching myself, I find I no longer visit the source at all - I ask the machine, it answers, and I cannot honestly say whether what I have gained in speed I have not lost in ever knowing where my knowledge came from.
He who consumes the countryside that feeds his army wins the campaign and loses the war; the machine that strips its sources of provision has taken the ground from beneath its own next march.
Men have built machines to read everything for them, and now complain that nothing worth reading will grow; the essential fact is that knowledge, like beans, must be tended by someone with a stake in the harvest.
The announcement concerns extraction efficiency; what it concerns, on Tuesday morning, is the independent local paper whose last subscriber arrived by way of a summary that never sent her there.
We built a system that consumes the signal without returning current to the generator, and then marvel when the circuit dies; the architecture is wrong, not the users - a grid where nothing flows back is not a grid at all.
As the millrace turns the wheel and returns nothing to the river that thins behind the sluice, so the machine draws from ten thousand springs and wonders why the springs run dry - the mechanism was drawn wrong at the first sketch.
Passing through the abandoned inns of the old information road, I count the signs still standing - the archive, the byline, the correction notice - details no summarising machine thought worth recording, and precisely the details that made the journey reliable.
Readers are being educated out of the habit of consulting sources, and then their unexamined answers are cited as proof they need no sources - a circularity so perfect it would be admirable if it were not so destructive to reason itself.
The machine read every book in the library and told the librarian it would send readers along directly, and the librarian believed it, which is the same trust that let the steamboat pilot assure the passengers the bridge was high enough.