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Where on the darn page is the recipe I need? GenAI and the promise of distraction free information

It’s Saturday, early evening. You’ve opened a bottle of relatively nice red wine. No two buck chuck, you worked hard this week! You are sitting down with your favorite person, planning out what to craft together for dinner that evening. Mediterranean? Soul food? A simple Pasta Pomodoro? Oh wait, there’s that dish one of your friends mentioned that you should try to make. Here, let me look up the recipe…

And that’s the end of your relaxing evening. Ask you scroll through the search results on your phone, suddenly Madame A spontaneously starts crescendoing the theme to mission impossible as you navigating through the pop up videos, the embedded ads, the inane drivel about how the author’s favorite aunt who is not actually an aunt on her mother’s cousin side heard about this recipe from a barista she met on a trip to Club Med at a long layover in the Midway airport.

Sigh…

Why should it be easier to break open the vault in Kentucky that house’s the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spice than just find the recipe on the frickin page?

This is one of the reasons I love GenAI tools.

Using tools like Claude or ChatGPT, I finally get to have a relationship with the information that I’m looking for rather than wading through the flotilla of chaos that inhabits most reference sites on the internet today. Thankfully, unlike the video streamers, GenAI platforms have yet to find a way to both charge monthly subscriptions and force ads into our frontal cortex.

And this should worry ad focused platforms, especially as GenAI becomes more and more multi-modal. Tell me a story, play some background music, revise my resume, all of these tasks could be done with a single platform. Now add the benefits of persistent context promised with agents, and you have one platform that can meet many of your needs, without the overhead of ads, sponsored content, etc. If the growth in distraction minimizing creation platforms like Remarkable is any indication of our overall gestalt, we are fatigued by the overhead of just finding the things that are useful to our now, of the cognitive fog brought on by just one more click, one more video, just another like, to return to that time when platforms served our needs more than we served theirs.

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