Slightly delayed...
Dan Russell
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Slightly delayed...
I should have known this would happen...
... I took the silver flying bird to Copenhagen today, instead of writing the answer to last week's SRS Challenge. I was looking forward to spending some quality time thinking about AI summaries... but it's too big a topic to knock out in an hour.
SO... in order to create the bespoke, hand-crafted, lovingly artisanal SRS answer that you expect, I decided to push it out a week to give me a bit of extra time.
BUT... if you find yourself in Copenhagen tomorrow (Friday, May 9, 2025), I'll be speaking at the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at 14:00. Here's the link for you, just in case you're around. (And if you DO make it to my talk, please stick around afterwards and let me know you're a SearchResearcher. The passphrase will be "I verify all my searches.")
Title: People, AI, and online research
Abstract: Given all of the press that LLMs have garnered, it’s worthwhile asking if they’re changing the ways people find information. Are LLMs pulling traffic away from the search engines? Just as importantly, how do regular people think about the quality of information they get from their favorite AI systems? One key lesson of my research into the UX of AI systems over the past 30 years is that people don’t really understand what AI is, how it works, or what it means for them. I’ll review some successes and failures of earlier research approaches, what we should learn from these decades of practice at the boundary between human experience and the use of intelligent systems, and where AI systems will change knowledge practices in the future.
Keep searching!
