I enjoyed Ashlee Vance’s article about students building weird and possibly dangerous stuff like fusors using AI. It actually made me recall a time as a teenager when I discovered a website with seemingly complete instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb.

Owing to the availability of terror guides online, and more recently the idea of 3D printable guns, many worry that the one consequence of freely transmittable information information will be that bad or stupid people, armed with knowledge they would never otherwise have had access to, will do bad and stupid stuff with that knowledge.

Of course, the internet doesn’t just enable the transmission of information, but also the retrieval of information by pretty much anyone. ChatGPT didn’t invent this - Google did.

Now, someone else I know is setting up a Shopify store and some accounting software. Starting from zero accounting knowledge, he wants to make sure he’s paying the right tax and to do that he needs Shopify to talk to Xero (the accounting software). But the ways in which these software talk to eachother is steeped in arcane 15th century Venetian ideas of accountancy (“why do I need a clearing account?”). Of course, being an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, my first instinct was to consult Google and find a helpful blog post, or a QA site, which would give a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this surely very common setup.

But Google doesn’t exist anymore! Ok - something called “Google” certainly does still exist, and if you go to “google.com” you will find a box with a “Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, but Google and “Google” have about as much in common with eachother as does that excellent TV show from the 90s called The Simpsons and the strange zombie still inexplicably being produced in 2025 called “The Simpsons”.

In other words - people use ChatGPT not because it’s a revolutionary new way to look up information, but because the business model of search - providing people with the information they were looking for - was subsumed by the much more lucrative business model of advertising - providing people with information originating from the highest bidder.

In any analysis of Gen-Z’s use of ChatGPT (and Tik-Tok for that matter) to find information in just the same way you and I used to use Google, the question we should be asking is - why has no one been able to make a substantial business out of giving people the information they actually need?