Lately I’ve had a lot of feelings when I’ve tried to search things on the internet. Google’s hegemony has steadily been growing since 1998 when it was introduced but with the rise of AI it seems that the whole model of navigating the internet has been upended.
I’ve tried to use other search engines to get rid of the still very much error prone LLM’s feeding me the information I’m supposed to be looking for. DuckDuckGo has lately been my go to search engine, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m not finding what I am genuinely looking for anymore. Most found sites and sources seem iffy at best, and it seems there are even AI-generated websites out there flooding the already muddled waters.
It got me thinking on how I engage with information and how I look for information as well. Most of my interactions with the internet are through the big tech companies, who in my opinion have become “Truth Shapers”. When there are a few companies (and/or billionaires who own most of the media) who decide what information you get, when and what information you don’t get, objective information is under threat. What are the blind spots in the data of those LLM’s? It has been trained on the internet, but a lot of stuff that is relevant in the real world has never been on the internet, so it’s also not in an LLM. If it’s not in the data set, “it doesn’t exist”. I think that’s the wrong way around! The internet / social media seems to want to “shape the truth” by being the main way (or filter) of how we interact with the world.
Since i am a millennial, I’ve grown up “with” the internet and the rise of (smart)phones in everybody’s pockets. I come from an age where the internet was still very young and underdeveloped (we did not have apps for example in the beginning). I remember the internet being a wild place where you could find a lot of niche information you would not have found otherwise. A lot of information also just was not on the internet. Often times i’ve needed (old) books to get information to get through my schoolwork.
With the rise of Google and its search engine, along with social media there came a need to “filter” the information to cater to you as a user, so you could more effectively find what you wanted. This has not been a deliberate “evil” (not at first at least, at that time Google still had the “don’t be evil” moniker so it seems they at least would know the impact of them deciding things) choice at first, since it genuinely made the service better. Social media also needed a way to filter the most relevant people and/or information for you (I also remember social media being just that, social media, and not a “news” source) so they also took part in this filtering. This came to be known as the “filter bubble”. If you’re interested in that, take a gander at: (VIDEO). I can’t believe this video is 15 years old already.
This made Google one of the first big truth shapers (with Meta joining them promptly later in the early years of 20XX). They “decided” what you saw online more and more. Although the internet is a relatively new technology, the practice of truth shaping has not been new.
When Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press got invented the concept of the then “objective truth” also got fractured and radically altered power dynamics and changed who had a say on what “the truth” was. Objective reality was no longer a monopoly of the church. This introduction also had other effects, it greatly quickened the spread of knowledge, discoveries and literacy in Europe at the time. (source)
Objective truth has always been a gray area. It’s messy to get to the bottom of things. To get as close as possible you need a multitude of different sources contradicting, correcting and refining each other. But that process seems to fade more and more with billionaire oligarchs and their algorithms catering strict filter bubbles and isolating groups of people online in thousands of subcultures. The bigger overarching “monoculture” has been fractured more than ever. I don’t believe this was the intention when all these technologies got introduced. I think it’s hard pressed (pun intended) to believe that the intention of the introduction of the printing press was the strengthening of the eventual protestant reformation for instance (see previous source). Just the same, I don’t believe it was the intention of a company like google to divide the internet in filter bubbles. I do believe that as time got on, other companies, such as google and other (private) actors with political ambitions saw the fertile ground for propaganda and social and cultural division to gain power and money that filter bubbles offer. I can’t prove it of course, but I believe the rise of right wing politics in Europe and the world is partly explainable by filter bubbles and targeted marketing (source). The internet became large and influential enough (along with other technologies and smartphones) for a company like Cambridge Analytica to inevitably come into existence.
Now we are in an age where the information streams are in the hands of a few companies and people (source) who don’t seem to necessarily care about objectivism. The “useful” filter bubble seems to be hijacked by business and politics. Tech companies and people who are after power are, or want to become the new truth shapers. Think of all the young people now getting their information from TikTok. Check out the drama surrounding the US takeover of TikTok and how they’ve changed the algorithm (source). At the risk of sounding old and grumpy again, I remember a time where i was not allowed to cite wikipedia as a source, because “everyone can add anything to that site, you should get your information from multiple books from the school library”. Oh how times have changed.
I used to hate when the teachers said these things. The same teacher for example also used to tell me that I should be able to calculate difficult things in my head because “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”…
But now there seems to be a grain of truth to their first statement. At least on using multiple sources to form your own opinion to at least try to get near to an objective truth. For this I have my father in law as inspiration. He subscribes to almost all the newspapers, so he can form his own opinion based on discrepancies or is at least able to read between the lines a bit better. This is of course still not enough. To get to an objective truth even better he needs to talk to people who subscribe to all the news websites maybe, or get their news from other sources. Otherwise he’s just created another analog filter bubble for himself, although it is a widespread one. Of course, there are also filter bubbles that are so far away from reality that maybe they should not be considered as objective truth anyway : drinking raw milk?
The way out seems to be incredibly difficult as media, information and power consolidates in a slowly shrinking group of people. The first step in my opinion is to become more media savvy and to promote critical thinking and discourse between humans, especially when they seem to differ in opinions on the surface. I also think the internet needs to grow up to be a bit more scientific in how it works. In a world where you can post anything and everything as truth, how can we accurately bridge the gap between the digital “reality” and the “analog” real one? I don’t have a clear answer yet, but I strongly believe that the pressures on excellent schooling and scientific advances by the powers that be are an indication that we need to look in that direction (source).
Further reading:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html
Artydetails 