Around 300 B.C., King Ptolemy I — the new ruler of Egypt and a former general of Alexander the Great — tasked an adviser with a modest mission: "to collect, if possible, all the books in the world." Over the next two centuries, the great library in the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria would be filled with hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls: the full corpus of ancient Greek and Egyptian literature along with Buddhist, Jewish, and Zoroastrian texts. Ships would be searched for books when they docked at Alexandria, and royal agents would pay hefty sums for almost any written work. A booming market in fakes and forgeries soon emerged. Entrepreneurial scribes dashed off scrolls of supposed secret wisdom from famous thinkers — one was titled Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid — while others created books that mixed the authentic with the imagined. In Alexandria's merchant quarter, stalls that once sold vegetables and baskets were "replaced with those stacking rolls and rolls of books," writes historian Islam Issa.
Eventually, the library had to hire experts to wade through the sea of bogus texts and identify genuine treasures. The web, our modern-day library of Alexandria, faces a similar problem. This digital repository of human knowledge is being swamped with AI-generated slop — pointless listicles, nonsensical how-to guides, and factually flawed news summaries churned out by content factories that want to grab clicks and ad revenue on the cheap. To save users the hassle of scrolling through reams of garbage links in its search engine, Google has now started showing users AI-generated answers to their queries. But those answers are sometimes wrong — one user who wanted a fix for a car's faulty turn signal was advised to "replace the blinker fluid" — and pull traffic and dollars away from useful, human-run websites. Maybe the tech giant should hire more humans to curate trustworthy collections of knowledge. It could call them "librarians."
This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Democrats’ strategy to woo voters for 2026: religionThe Explainer Politicians like Rob Sand and James Talarico have made a name for themselves pushing their faith
-
Pregnancy in AmericaFeature Why is it getting riskier to give birth in the U.S.?
-
The potential warning sign of an auto lender’s bankruptcyIn the Spotlight Tricolor collapse an ‘extreme example’ of economy’s challenges
-
Albania’s AI government minister: a portent of things to come?In The Spotlight A bot called Diella has been tasked with tackling the country's notorious corruption problem
-
The tiny Caribbean island sitting on a digital 'goldmine'Under The Radar Anguilla's country-code domain name is raking in millions from a surprise windfall
-
GPT-5: Not quite ready to take over the worldFeature OpenAI rolls back its GPT-5 model after a poorly received launch
-
Will online age checks doom internet freedom?Today's Big Question Or do they protect children from harm?
-
Broken brains: The social price of digital lifeFeature A new study shows that smartphones and streaming services may be fueling a sharp decline in responsibility and reliability in adults
-
The Hermit Kingdom's laptop warriorsFeature American firms are unwittingly hiring IT workers with a second job—as North Korean operatives
-
Deep thoughts: AI shows its math chopsFeature Google's Gemini is the first AI system to win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad
-
Big Brother is watching: Wi-Fi signals can track you in your homeUnder the radar It could open the door to mass surveillance
