When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened

The key thing that we are all forgetting is to really think about what people want and why they do things.

Reddit and hyperlinks are a good example.

Posting this link, and me reading this post, are both about discussion. I could dive into the link to see what this writer thinks but I’m, clearly, more interested in getting my opinion out there and having a discussion with multiple people.

Depending on the length of the article, if I (and other Redditors often) encounter an article/discussion where reading it is necessary to have a conversation I may choose to simply not engage. The seconds spent creating and communicating my position are the ones that I am most invested in and I simply may not have enough thought power to give in order to both read and comment on an article.

What AI summaries do is give me a method to understand the article with less investment. It always seems highly appreciated when someone throws a tl;dr as the top comment which is the same thing as an AI summary.

People want summaries because they want the information but aren’t willing to spend the full amount of time the author asks for.

Now you can argue that the person writing the piece deserves money for it (via clicks) or deserves to have us read their opinion, but that isn’t how freedom works. They are free, as human beings, to write the articles they want. I am free as a human being to choose whether to read those. No one can “earn” the right to force someone to create content (and thus why Winds of Winter will never release) and no one can “earn” the right to force others to read their content.

The Internet is an offer to exchange ideas. Headlines are a method of convincing people that they want to read your article and, AI summaries are much the same thing. If you have a complex and insightful piece then people will likely be intrigued by the summary. If it is capable of being summarized in a headline then it wasn’t worth reading.

Now, I do agree that we need to come up with a new social contract of the Internet. Clearly people don’t want to read long articles (or else this wouldn’t be a concern). In order to make those articles the writers need to both be capable of paying their bills and feeling like people are engaging with their ideas. I don’t know what the best solution is but it isn’t “let’s force people to read articles even when they don’t want to”.