This is one thing that has really hit me: I have a question and I always default to Gemini flash or haiku instead of finding quality writing on a subject. So I get the same tinned bullet-point format every time, and my knowledge has become wider, but can only be so deep--only so many things can fit in one's head at any time--so I pay the opportunity cost of finding something that I enjoy sinking my teeth into.
I think about my favorite bands, or games, etc. the ones I cherish most are those hidden gems that I either stumbled upon during some rabbit hole or as a recommendation from a friend. How do I get that now? I can ask Claude, I guess.
If you do try to go down rabbit holes with AI, you get a deluge of information, but it is basically like what Google has become, minus the ads: aggregates the most easily accessible data, blends it up and distills it to some slurry that might kind of be coherent, and which will definitely sound authoritative, but... Is it?
And, of course, then what happens to the hidden gems that have a very low (whatever the equivalent of) PageRank but maybe because they're not highly optimized, ultra-processed and generally agreeable or popular. The channels through which one could readily receive information are all being flooded out/absorbed. Maybe I should try Kagi, or get into irc and build that rss graph.
Two's complement just had a great episode on this topic. None of us have absorbed the costs of the tradeoff we are all making by using these things, much like we didn't for using social media, or the slide into the techno-corporate surveillance state that happened after the patriot act. We are paying those costs and I am certainly feeling them more than ever recently.