AI search is atomizing our information, warns government digital designer

We must design expecting much of what we publish will be reinterpreted by ‘systems we don’t control’

Those who rely on artificial intelligence to summarize official material may get a misleadingly narrow or incomplete version of it, a senior designer for the UK government has warned.

The country’s Department for Education’s digital services are seeing more traffic from AI-mediated search and fewer actual page visits, according to head of design Mark Edwards. “At first, this felt like progress; faster access to information is not something to resist,” he writes in a blogpost on the GOV.UK website. “But as we looked closer, a more complicated picture emerged.”