Stephen Downes

OpenAI has released a new ChatGPT browser called Atlas. Not surprisingly, it has generated a lot of commentary, the most trenchent of which is this post from Anil Dash. It "actively fights against the web," he argues, and it's hard not to agree. "Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web," he notes. And that's a problem. If I search for 'Tylor Swift', I want to see Taylor Swift's own web page, not an AI generated article about Taylor Swift. "The clear intent was that I was meant to stay within the AI-generated results, trapped in that walled garden." But it's not just that. Why are we typing queries into our browser at all? The great thing about the web is that we can click a link and be taken somewhere. "It's very clear," writes Dash, "that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web's original design."