This year is going to be the year of artificial intelligence (AI). It’s something that’s been developing steadily for years, but it will start to appear everywhere. Where AI is already with us, it will get far more sophisticated (has anyone else noticed how much better GMail has got at completing their messages?).
GPT-4 is imminent. If that doesn’t mean much now, it will soon. There’ll be so much machine generated copy in the future that I’d recommend any young person interested in writing as a career to train as a proof-reader instead. It’ll be a long time before people will trust machine generated copy without a human having checked it.
Answering questions with answers
We’re also likely to see a trend towards conversational search online. The model of inputting search terms has already been overtaken by inputting questions. The next step may well be for the search engine to answer user questions with, well, answers, rather than a list of links. As we know, Google is already doing this to some extent, but there are huge implications if it continues to take people away from our websites. And how will it monetise this?
There is some excellent analysis being written almost daily, some of it by humans. I’d urge you to read around the subject, as it will affect all of us. Or go back to some evergreen content like Tim Urban’s huge article The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (2015) which remains a fantastic introduction.