Users vs Content. AI Vs Humans.

Some of us who are from the pre-google era would recollect how information spread across the internet was difficult to find, one had to use multiple search engines, meta search engines, crawlers and lists to find information. There were Altavisa, Lycos, Askjeeves, Northern light and others and before that plain simple text search called "Gopher". The onus of finding the right information was on the user, use multiple search engines, experiment and play around with keywords, use meta crawlers, and find the right links. In-fact finding something that you wanted was like winning a game. Searching and finding information on the internet was an Art.

Fast forward two decades, with monetization of content happening across platforms, the tide has turned, people are churning posts, images, videos to get users. This new economic model is disastrous because of some simple facts. When monetization is done basis number of views and length of a video, you get sensationalism, fake news and copied content which may have a shelf life of only for a few days. Not only does it attract creators to create fleeting content which will get millions of views but it also means that people who are neither experts nor have any idea about the subject matter become overnight experts to monetize the interest of users.

A good example of this is useless content which gets created on video platforms, the creators use interesting and innovative ways to attract users to watch, including things like the first caption and image which will be enticing and sensational but has no bearing to the actual video or information. I am sure you would have fallen for such traps by clicking on videos based on the title and and headline but realized later that the video didn't provide the information that it was supposed to.

A Case in point is the sad demise of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, content creators have used the Youtube platform to launch thousands of videos spinning news content with innovative captions like "Mystery deepens", "XYZ arrested", "chilling evidence". Not just that, people have used the emotions of fans to spin absurd, fake and manipulative videos which play with people's emotions. A self proclaimed spirit channel has rendered a video on "Talking to Sushant's spirit", the video series has garnered millions of views where the spirit channel is seen talking to Sushant's spirit and Sushant's voice is replying to his questions from the Spirit world. Youtubers like these are not just earning money from views but wasting millions of hours of viewer's time which could have been spent getting some valuable information or knowledge. Now the story doesn't stop there, the guys video is then copied by other users who want to make a quick buck and youtube is full of hundreds of videos with useless commentaries from youtubers who know nothing about Sushant nor about the spirit world explaining to others what Sushant's spirit is trying to communicate and who killed Sushant. Ultimately terabytes of storage, bandwidth and millions of man hours are spent on stuff which is useless from information, knowledge or entertainment.

Another breed of sit at home investigative journalists and detectives have used this sad event for churning out fake content and revelations and they have beaten sherlock holmes and byomkesh bakshi at playing detective. Fake photographs, videos are sensationalized and peddled to fans who want to know what happened to their favorite celebrity.

Not just fake but completely useless stuff which carries neither data, information nor any knowledge is peddled on youtube and other video channels, so much so that there are now videos which take this crap and roast their creators, thus the crappy content itself becomes source of another level of useless stuff. It's amazing how people can watch a video whose main idea is showcasing stuff that the creator is acknowledging to be crap. All these should be tagged as "Waste of Time". Just like natural resources and non renewable resources, time in the life of a human being is a non-renewable resource, you can't go back in time. Millions of man hours are wasted on creating and viewing content which offers nothing to humanity.

Wastage of resources like compute, storage, internet bandwidth, electricity is also a side effect of this. Why spend limited resources on the planet on storage and processing of useless data consuming energy and power 24x7 and creating an ecological disaster.

The other side effect of this monetization is far more subtle yet dangerous, people who create genuine content will get sidelined, their videos won't show up on top because of the AI algorithms showing related but useless stuff. A User who has clicked on few such links will now start getting suggestions on more crappy content and the good content will be beyond his reach since the video platform and search engines would have locked his preference as "crap". Slowly the ease with which fake and sensational content can be created versus the time and effort taken to create genuine knowledge will mean that more and more useless content will come on these platforms, it is like a downward spiral triggered by monetization policies and the AI engines deciding what you want to see.

The platforms need to look at the monetization policies and processes to ensure that useless, fake, sensationalizing videos should be filtered. Using AI for recommendation should be evaluated for self fulfilling spirals just like algorithms in stock market which can create a flash crash because every algorithm deciphers that the market is going down and starts selling, in-turn prompting other algos to sell further. If not controlled these algorithms can take a human down a spiral of useless information.

All this is causing information overload which has significant negative effects on the psychology of humans. Multitasking, flipping, getting bombarded with information on a daily basis causes the body to increase the production of stress hormone cortisol as well as adrenaline which together result in over stimulation of the human brain and cause both short term and long term negative effects.

The exciting headlines of pushed information causes distraction and attracts us to ever new and exciting information and results in neural addiction. Ultimately we reach a state where we are more confused than informed. Information overload results in brain fog, confusion, reduced ability to focus and destroys decision making capability.

Alvin Toffler's advice to us remains so valid "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who, cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

How information and search engine world would change with new AI engines like GPT-3 which can create content automatically remains to be seen, the line between what is real vs what is fiction would further become hazy. With state of art AI becoming capable of rendering realistic videos and audio called deep fakes how humanity would differentiate between the real and the unreal is a question yet unanswered.

If platforms like Youtube do not focus on analyzing the utility and accuracy of what is posted and tune their recommendation algorithms , all it takes is a click on crappy content by a user and he will be flooded with similar useless information and denied the vast library of genuine knowledge. Imagine the fate of a user whose life changed because he clicked on a few useless videos and then the algorithms worked overtime to ensure he is bombarded by similar content and the individual is sent down the rabbit hole which slowly but surely impacts his thought process,preferences, views, opinions, thoughts and ultimately his mind and his life. If algos have their way One click can change your life!