What Mike Caulfield is saying here is subtle but important. The internet was disintermediating. It closed the distance between you and a primary information source. You could read the actual publication rather than a summary. By contrast, "We often hear that AI is an intermediating technology compared to search, a point I sometimes make as well. Sources are often hidden or post hoc." But this assumes we would have actually conducted the search, which isn't always true. "What AI seems to be replacing is doing no search at all. It's replacing sources of information that are very distant in time or place." This is what we can call "fuzzy disintermediation", he says. And the problem is that the source of the information is now very far from the recipient, and that changes in the nature or credibility of the source are unlikely to be relayed to the recipient.
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