Remote Frog

During a recent conversation, a colleague painted a compelling picture: websites evolving into trusted single sources of truth, providing authoritative data that AI can access to answer questions and perform actions on behalf of users. An scenario where what content creators really want is to be sure their content is discoverable by AI models. And the Future website should make this possible in the most straightforward possible way.

This sparked several uncomfortable realizations and made me think.

Notes on using AI to answer questions.

I mainly use Perplexity for searches, and I usually read and swallow (accept) what Perplexity tells me. As I’m a super curious guy, I also click -just sometimes- on the links, to discover that a non-negligible portion aren’t actually connected with what they are supposed to, or at least that I cannot find the facts behind perplexity assertions there.

Corollary: With Google, we had a list of sometimes spuriously ordered sources that I needed to navigate to answer my questions. With Perplexity: I have an answer and just if I have a lot of time or I feel like going further, I click on a link (I’m offered just a handful of them, one or two for each main idea, which are often repeated several times for an answer)

Reflections set #1:

• It looks like we traded the ownership of our knowledge in exchange for having more knowledge, tons of knowledge I don’t know what to do with?
• Are we transitioning from knowledge producers to knowledge consumers?
• Can we even call knowledge to something I’ve not learned but just acquired and blindly accepted?
• For Content Creation platforms… Do we risk enthroning the AI aggregator/curator/call-it-as-you-want as the authoritative source?

NOTES ON Content creators WILLINGNESS to ensure their sites are discoverable by AI

I’m a content creator. My question is… what for? I mean what I need AI to disscover my site for? The main joys of creating for me are: (1) sparking meaningful conversations with interesting people, and why not? (2) receiving recognition or praise for good work. Sometimes I have a (3), turning personal notes into posts to organize long-term thinking and to reuse later when writing articles.

My point is that making my content “AI-discoverable” does not guarantee that anyone will read it, even not that I get credit for the ideas by the AI tool.

I recently co-created a book and a short film with Paco Santamaría. We left it in a website. But we chose not to promote it on social networks—not out of fear of piracy, but because we did not want our beloved work to be a replaceable/disposable piece that lasts for ten seconds before getting blurred in an endless feed. Instead, we preferred a smaller audience that gave us their full attention for a few minutes, so we presented the work in person. That felt more aligned with what we wanted. Social networks, and now even more AI, tend to turn creation into just another replaceable fragment in a giant stream or a ready-to-swallow mash, without necessarily bringing people to the original creators.

Corollary: Some concent creators may not want their content to be discoverable by AI. They might just want it to be read by genuinely interested people.

Reflections #2:

• In case a part of the genuine original content creators stop finding joy in creating and sharing on the Internet what they make… will we see an Internet where echo, repetition, shallow content takes over? -more-.

Notes on the future website.

I was thinking of content creators over a website of theirs or in a platform… Like bloggers, tumblrbloggers, podcasters… I was thinking of the website of the future. And this might be a question that simply assumes too much. To start with it assumes there is a “website” in the future.

My colleague George showed me something… a website is simply a tool that does a job. So we would need to understand: what is that job ? According to his take, websites, blogging platforms, newsletters, social media… were all tools that helped individuals and brands convey a message. First over text, then evolved to ultra short pieces of text, images, video, short-form video. The tools changed, but the underlying human need didn’t: human beings are social creatures that want to connect with others, tell stories… and we’ll always gravitate toward the best medium to convey our message. George suggested to basculate questions to:

• How do individuals and brands want to communicate with their audiences today?
• What new capabilities -AI related- exist today and in which way they unlock potential that is useful to individuals and brands?
• How is this linked with human needs: trust, identity, storytelling connection…

Reflections #3:

• (Taken from George) Is the answer still about websites being or not the authoritative data layer? Or is about something broader like a presence layer, an identity layer, a trust anchor that manifests across many surfaces?
• Have the evolution of the format in which messages are sent (from text to short videos) run in parallel with human needs? What are the reasons behind that so fast evolution of message formats? Is it to better adapt to human needs or are you as skeptical as I am?

Lots of questions to start the year. A real gift to those that appreciate challenges.