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More worries about AI-- DO NOT USE AI OVERVIEW!

 https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/what-happens-when-no-one-is-curious?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=2pwl1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

First part:

Former Google employee and current neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published a chilling article at the New York Times on Google’s shift from giving links to search queries to offering AI summaries. You may not have thought much about this shift, but it’s radical and is changing how many people perceive the world. Google has 91% of the search market share. This is how people get their questions answered (although increasingly they will turn to AI—more on that in a minute). In the past, Google didn’t give you answers to your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and—most important to this article—sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea but you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questions directly, cutting out the path of exploration? Here’s what Le Cunff writes:

When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.

I worry about this, deeply. I worry about a culture that is illiterate, distracted, and incurious. As Christians, we have an obligation to attend to the wondrous world that God has created. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” God has concealed his glory in all of creation, in the works of humanity, in the faces of people, in the natural world. And it is our glory to search things out, to discover and to give him glory. This kind of curiosity should not be confused with curiositas, which I have written about before. I’m speaking about a healthy, God-honoring curiosity about what God has made and worked through humans.

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