How to improve your information diet in a generative AI world

2023-05-02

Now that low- or negative-quality content has moved from "too much" to "nearly ubiquitous" it's time to reconsider from scratch the basic architecture of a functional online information architecture.

In this kind of informational environment, a social network timeline is almost the worst possible way to gather and filter information: you're reading guided by a combination of gameable engagement-maximizing algorithms, your hopefully well-meaning but not particularly expert peers, and an cloudton of bot-generated optimized material.

A better architecture looks pretty much the opposite of it: Most of the time, read directly the output of individual experts regularly surveying their fields.

There are comparatively very few people and sources matching that description, yet more than any single person can reasonably keep up with.

The more algorithmic processing there is between the original work (be it scientific, journalistic, or artistic) and what you're seeing on your screen, the more important it is the work of identifying reliable expert sources. Not because there's anything "bad" about algorithmic processing, but simply because none of the algorithms working on the background of your tools and sites has been built to optimize the quality of your information diet.