Yarin@yaringal
I recently changed my position with AISI (the UK govt's AI security institute) to an expert advisor position which allows me again to express my views publicly and engage with the media, and I have some stuff to share.
I've been reading Sir Tim Berners-Lee's recently released memoir, which covers the history of his (and many others') long struggle to keep the web open, and this specific observation from the book really stuck me: when you use Gmail or twitter or ChatGPT or whatever, you are not the customer of these companies; you are their _product_. Their customers are the companies buying your data.
This made me think about the next big challenge around keeping the web open, and I think it is most likely gonna be user-capture with AI browsers - and at the moment there's no open source alternative to an AI browser outside of Google's, Microsoft's, and openAI's recently launched browser (I know there's a few more smaller non-open-source players as well).
User capture by AI browsers could manifest in many different ways. The most obvious one is users being shown only a filtered version of the web that the companies want the users to see: agents automatically buying products that pay for their promotion going against users' best interest, new ways to create filter bubbles through AI summaries of news websites acting as filters to real news, and new ways to bias political opinions through editing of web pages before these are shown to the user. Other major concerns include users being coerced by the AI browser to perform actions not in their best interest (eg persuading users to buy products they don't need, use gambling sites that pay for their promotion), and privileged user data being used to further improve the big companies' models, widening the gap between the big companies and any competition.
I think this could be another pivotal moment to the web and I was chatting to some friends about trying to set up an open source alternative that would allow users to still have deep AI integration (eg to find which of my hundreds of open tabs had that recipe I was looking for), but at the same time also allow users to select the AI backend separately from the browser provider. Another avenue is raising awareness of these risk to the open web, and mobilising people to act.
Does this make sense? I'm curious to hear people's thoughts...
