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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

The AI wave is doing this, by which I mean it is finally separating the content and presentation of information and allowing the collation and reformatting of substance across multiple entities which today each have their own interfaces.

For example, the entire idea that we visit specific websites and manually compare prices when buying things is ridiculous and misses huge parts of the benefits of using computers in the first place.

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That's because the pendulum hasn't swung back in that direction yet. By this time next year, it's likely that many of the popular LLM sites will slip in advertisements, pushing the agenda of whoever trained the models.

And the arms race starts all over again.

I think this is actually a modern misunderstanding of the original benefits of computers. Computers were originally designed as a tool, they allowed us to work more efficiently but weren't directly taking over doing the actual work. A spreadsheet doid the calculations for me, but I had to provide both the data and the actual formulas to run.

AI, or more accurately machine learning, attempts to take us out of the process. It isn't separating content and presentation, it's separating content and understanding. The algorithm will read in data, compress it, and save only the patterns it learned. By the time the content is presented there is little connection to the original source and what I'm seeing isn't just a separated presentation layer, it's something entirely different like playing a game of telephone.

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