Mindless Chatter

The various podcasts I consume have recently seen (heard?) many more discussions of Google Zero, the end point of a process where internet searchers are stopping at the AI Summary and not clicking through to the linked sources. Yet those summaries are provably, often laughably, inaccurate. Perhaps people are just very credulous or cognitively lazy and don't spot the errors, but this seems unlikely because anyone using AI summaries or chatbot answers extensively, as people seem to, will quickly come across an error about something they do know about. Yet they continue using the tools.

This creates a puzzle: if someone cared enough to initiate a search (or ask a chatbot), why don't they care about the accuracy of the results? I think the answer is that AI summaries are presented in the form of someone talking to us and, by and large, we do not care very much about what people say when they are talking to us. We value the process of talking over the content of what is said, and have transferred that to AI outputs.

People really do talk a lot. If two or three are gathered together, there will be a conversation filling any possible moments of quiet. It is rare to observe companionable silence and it is often (mis)judged as coldness. Many people turn to talk radio or television as 'background' when they are alone. As a culture, we like to talk and be talked to, or at, for much of our waking lives.

Of course, some conversations are important or informative, but that must be the minority. Given the sheer volume, the average person will only remember a tiny fraction of what was said to them on any given day. And unscientific research (eavesdropping) suggests that little of it is worth remembering or intended to be such. People chatting idly about what they are having for supper, what they saw on social media, some sporting event, the weather or even their minor ailments are not intending to inform, enlighten or persuade their audiences, and those audiences do not listen with such expectations.

There will be some story to be told about the function of all this chatter, perhaps processing experiences, building confidence, coordinating shared values, reinforcing prejudices, defining the 'other' etc. That may matter. A lot.

But for now I just want to observe that the switch we are witnessing happening before our eyes from an internet of content produced by people to one of chatbots and AI summaries, is precisely the switch from an internet that was intended to entertain, or inform, or persuade, to an internet of mindless chatter, of ephemeral conversations that leave no mark. Many people have chosen to fill most of their days with mindless chatter before the advent of AI, and now those preferences are re-shaping the mainstream internet into a wall of unmemorable talk radio.

So long as the demand is there, it won't go away and we should accept it for what it is. But we also need to preserve the online spaces which are equivalent to libraries, newspapers, theatres, and political meetings.