Why AI summaries pose a danger to learning
We turn to the internet every day for answers. But what used to be a meandering journey is now an immediate arrival at your destination.
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When an AI tool answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen.
ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
More than 60 per cent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer.
Google is hardly alone. Claude, ChatGPT and upstart competitors like Perplexity do roughly the same thing: They take a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches – clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned – is disappearing.
