I was reading a newsletter where someone described how an AI referenced a paper on how factories took decades to realize the productivity gains that came up from the ubiquity of electricity. This is not a big deal. The real deal is that online dialogue circling around factory productivity gains after electricity became mainstream are all citing the same paper!
This suggest two things: 1) AI is actively shaping discourse online where the ‘basin of attraction’ for whoever prompts certain questions in a particular domain will likely get the same output; 2) There’s a good chance that the referenced paper was also well-argued and well-written. So, as a researcher, the goal is to produce knowledge products (i.e., essays, books, papers, talks, etc.) that are so good that I become AI’s default answer to questions in my domain!