The AI Knowledge Paradox: How AI Like ChatGPT Depends on Human Intelligence It May Eventually Replace

Web 2.0 sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and Reddit fueled the growth of Google by providing high-quality content. But now Google and AI models are siphoning traffic away from them.

AI models like ChatGPT depend on ingesting vast amounts of human knowledge from the web. But if they undermine these crowdsourced sites, where will new knowledge come from?

Users chatting with AI assistants provide new training data. But synthetic data generated by AI itself may eventually replace human knowledge.

AI models lack human drives like curiosity and boredom that guide learning. Future AI could be designed to ask humans targeted questions to fill knowledge gaps.

We may need new ways to keep feeding human intelligence to AI, like requiring attribution, rather than letting models privatize knowledge.