Is there no real information?
I was researching something online. Correction: I was attempting to research something online. Typed in the key search terms, got 100+ results. That's good, right? That should be plenty of information and opinions from lots of different sources and points of view. Okay, here we go!
Hmm. That's odd. From looking at the results summaries there seems to be a familiar 'sense' to many of them. No, to all of them I look at. Well of course because they're all about the same subject, so naturally there'd be not only similarities but duplication as well. In fact there's a lot of identical phrasing. What's going on here?
Now it could be that every site is pulling its info from the same source documents and quoting verbatim. Or it could be that they're all AI generated and thus the only differences are which LLM is used to construct the responses. Or it could be the worst case of plagiarism in the history of written language.
But you know what the worst part was?
None of them contain any actual information relevant to the particular query; it was all 'generalised' factoid regurgitation. Yet this lack of any hint of broad-range examination told me something very important:
I wasn't going to get what I needed from the Internet.
So much for "the information superhighway".
More like a digital Ditto machine.