This week, we bring some juicy food for your Friday feed — from a scholarly corner of the video-sphere!
I bet you’ve been wondering what academics are saying about AI’s disruptions to our search experiences and information economy. Never fear, INFIDEOS to the rescue!
The latest episode from Dr. Jenna Hartel (University of Toronto) spotlights an award-winning paper on exactly that. The author, Dr. Olof Sundin asks: “What happens when AI-infused information systems increasingly provide answers rather than directing people to sources?” In particular, what happens to our fundamental ability to discern the authority and accuracy of information, a cornerstone of information literacy?
It may feel like AI overviews have been around for ages, but Sundin demonstrates that we’ve been gradually shifting our expectations from search results as a list of sources to direct answers curated by search engines. This video gets especially interesting around 3:30, where Hartel brings Sundin’s sources to life — including the voices of student participants in a study on search behavior and AI, and tracing a gradual decline in searching for reputable sources to searching for quick answers (without confirming sources firsthand). A whistle-stop tour of our history of searching networked information appears around 6:30. If you’d like a 90-second digest, skip ahead to 11:15 for Hartel’s summary of what makes this paper great.
You can find more gems like this in Dr. Hartel’s INFIDEOS series on YouTube — who makes information scholarship look super cool!
Discussion
1 Thought on "INFIDEO Friday: How AI is Changing Our Search Experiences"
Dear Lettie and The Scholarly Kitchen readers, This is Jenna from INFIDEOS (mentioned above). A big thanks for your spirited posting about my most recent video on Artificial Intelligence and Olof Sundin’s great conference paper. I am thoroughly delighted the video caught your eye, and that you enjoyed the “whistlestop” tour of search infrastructures. The Scholarly Kitchen and INFIDEOS are certainly like-minded, and I hope we may share audiences and collaborate in the future. Warmest wishes, Jenna (https://www.youtube.com/c/infideos and http://www.jennahartel.info)
