As AI spills everywhere with quick answers, research finds that the internet’s soul is dying
A study from UC Riverside highlights the diminishing emotional and experiential depth of the internet as reliance on AI for answers increases. Researchers found that while human-written content incorporates logic, authority, and emotion, AI responses predominantly rely on logic alone. This shift raises concerns about the loss of nuanced human perspectives in online discourse.
- ▪The study compares AI responses to traditional web searches on subjective questions.
- ▪Researchers found that human-written blogs utilize logos, ethos, and pathos, while AI relies mainly on logos.
- ▪The findings suggest that AI-powered search results lack the nuances of human experience.
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| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/as-ai-spills-everywhere-with-quick-answers-research-finds-that-the-internets-soul-is-dying/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 08:33:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T08:39:59.772Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T08:39:59.772Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | oHjJh-bjBeKe |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A new collaborative study by UC Riverside computer and social scientists has found that as people increasingly rely on AI for answers, the internet risks losing the very thing that made it interesting in the first place: human emotion, lived experience, and messy, opinionated thinking. The study compared how AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini respond to subjective questions versus traditional web searches. The researchers asked both AI and web search engines opinion-heavy questions, such as whether governments should ban fossil-fuel cars or whether the US healthcare system needs reform, and analyzed the reasoning behind each response.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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