I’ve been thinking about an idea that begins with a quote that’s often attributed to Stewart Brand: “information wants to be free.”
And the I stumbled on this interview via a link from Jeremy’s blog with science fiction writer and thinker Ted Chiang. And he has this line in there which is actually a concise wrap up of a longer piece he had written.
I call LLMs a blurry JPEG because they give a low-resolution version of the internet. If you are using the internet to find information, which is what most of us use the internet for, it doesn’t really make sense to go with the low-resolution version when we have conventional search engines that point you to the actual information itself.
And it occurs to me that this is certainly one of the reasons AI tools bug me so much, especially those little summaries at the top of searches or articles or whatever. There is so much information on the internet, sitting there, waiting to be discovered, picked apart, and parsed on the way to insights both brilliant and banal. It’s the greatest achievement of modern history to have all that information right there.
Summaries are an attempt to create some sort of shortcut through that. But that’s not what happens. It’s not the information that we get, it’s a copy of a copy of a copy flattened out to an elementary level understanding spelled out with the affect of a customer service call. A blurry JPG, as Chiang puts it.
The information is no longer free. It’s locked up behind the summary. And so much is lost.