Fast Company: “You’ve probably already noticed your search engines are starting to evolve. Google and Bing have already added both AI-generated results and conversational chatbots to their respective search engines. The Browser Company, a startup that made a big early splash thanks to its mission statement of building a better internet browser, has launched an AI summary search. And OpenAI is reportedly building its own search engine to compete directly with Google. Even Reddit, one of the last oases of human-generated advice on the web, will soon start selling its user data to an AI company. Curiously, though, at no point amid our current AI arms race have the companies stuffing AI into our search engines and browsers offered any guidance as to what happens to the web if this truly is the future of the way we find things online. And it may be the best evidence yet that the AI industry is still completely engulfed in hype.  Or as Glitch CEO Anil Dash tells me, “Why is everyone in the industry lemmings.” …

The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit. Or, as Dash put it, “It’s the parasite that kills the host.”

See also Engadget: Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us? “A new Arc browser feature summarizes search results on a single web page and creates on its own, cheating websites.”