AI and the Information Ecosystem

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(This is a “multimodal” article: you can watch it, listen to it (mp3 download), or read it below.)

I have a soft spot in my heart for all the titles on my bookshelf written before a particular date in time. The date is Wednesday, November 30, 2022. I think it was a day that changed everything.

On that late November Wednesday, a startup called OpenAI publicly released a chatbot called ChatGPT, which was built on a new transformer called GPT-3.5. The moment thrust awareness of AI into public consciousness. But more importantly, ChatGPT put generative AI at the fingertips of every person who wanted to try it. Within days, mass experimentation began. And it hasn’t stopped.

I think we will look back and see the release of ChatGPT as a watershed moment. We will recognize it as a pivot that permanently changed something fundamental about our relationship with information.

Prior to the mass proliferation and adoption of generative AI, humans reasonably and intuitively assumed that new knowledge was the product of other human brains synthesizing, conceptualizing, and making meaning out of other human experience. For centuries, this had been a stable heuristic. Humans ascribed status, power, intelligence, — and assigned lots of academic grades — informed by others’ ability to communicate ideas. But now, in the era of artificial intelligence, words strung together in a coherent sentence are no longer a dependable proxy for assessing any given human’s intelligence or ingenuity. In a world with “intelligence on tap,” “intelligence” and “human” no longer feel like the exclusive synonyms we once assumed them to be.

The cultural implications of this shift are impossible to escape. And the social changes will probably affect you, even if you vehemently hate AI, even if you are tracking the frontier limitations of the technology, even if you think AI is incapable of delivering truly valuable products, and even if you think the whole charade is a sleight of hand—a party trick. No matter where you stand in the debate, we all have one thing in common: the old assumptions we took for granted about the “humanness” of human creations no longer apply.

We are never going back to the way things were before. There will never, ever be another book written in the old world that existed before November 30, 2022. Henceforth, everything that comes across our mental dashboards has a greater-than-zero probability of being created or augmented by extrahuman inputs from an AI algorithm.

The question, “I wonder if they used AI to make this?” will be with us for the rest of our lives.

So, here’s my working hypothesis: because we’re never going back to that old world, something fundamental has shifted about how ideas themselves “work” and “move” through human society and culture.

Take these very words, for example. Beyond merely reading this article, you could...

Thanks to generative AI, this article can now cut across media, language, and representation, with nothing more than a click of a button. This article can respawn and multiply its meaning because AI can infinitely respawn and reincarnate this content. In a sense, this is not an “article” anymore, but raw data—seed material for limitless reimagining, repurposing and repackaging.

Whether you are teaching a course, communicating your research, or just sharing ideas, your message now exists in this new information ecosystem. You should assume your message will be remixed, multimodal and adapted at scale, far beyond your purview and control. You are no longer creating “courses” or “articles” or “papers”—you are creating data to be transformed and inform the creations of others.

This mass disruption to our information environment also brings opportunities. For example, we should reevaluate our quirky belief that we can measure learning by the accuracy of regurgitating data. We might critically rethink the myth of the lone genius—and the bias for individualism underpinning it. This moment invites us to scrutinize our latent assumptions about the nature of originality. Looking at the long arcs of history, we should wrestle with the proposition that it is ideas, not bylines, that matter. “Modernity enshrined the myth of the author as sovereign originator,” writes Jonathan Boymal, but the age of AI represents the opportunity to reconsider the classical, ancient roots of authorship itself: tending, collecting, and stewarding ideas, not merely egotistically laying claim to them.

The ways that ideas move through society are drastically, irrevocably changing beneath our feet.

The Challenge

Challenge Option 1:

Re-visit this article in a different modality. If you read the manuscript, try watching the video, listening to an audio narration of the text, or tuning in to an AI-generated podcast analysis of the document. How does changing the medium shift or inform your interpretation of the message? How does the intervention and intermediation of AI change, expand, or curtail the meaning of the manuscript to you?

Challenge Option 2:

Conduct the above experiment on the next article or document you read or write. Take the next document that you need to read and upload the text to Google’s NotebookLM or ElevenLab’s GenFM to experience an AI-generated “second pass” at the content (if this is not available on the open web, make sure you have permission to do so). What does AI emphasize or highlight that you may have missed? What originally felt more important to you that the AI summarization underemphasizes?

Challenge Option 3:

Are you feeling a tinge (or a torrent?) of nostalgia for the old world of a mere 936 days ago? Consider this effort to build a virtual time capsule of writing that was composed before the “contamination” of AI explosion. How do you feel about your older writing from a few years back versus what you “co-author” with AI today? If you write regularly, here’s another interesting experiment: try using a text editor like iA Writer to automatically colour code the text you create and edit, in contrast to the AI-generated outputs you incorporate. Do you feel like working with AI makes you a better writer, thinker or communicator, or just faster?

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Disclosure

I used ProWritingAid to correct spelling and grammar on my original draft text. Based on this final manuscript, the “video version” of this article was made entirely with AI: ElevenLabs (for narration generation), HeyGen (for avatar synchronization), Veo 3 (for video footage), Suno 4.0 (for music) and Imagen 4 (for still images). The lyrics to the linked “broadway” song Since that Wednesday in Twenty-Two were written by Gemini 2.5, based on the text of this post.

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