What is an AI browser?
Or, in a more accurate representation of my mental reaction, *WTF* is an AI browser?
In wondering about this, I’m clearly behind the times. Tech sites are already doing roundups of their chosen “best” ones. At Mashable, Cecily Mouran compares “top” AI browsers because “The AI browser wars hath begun.”
Is the war that no one wants these things but they’re being forced on us anyway? Because otherwise…it’s just a bunch of heavily financed companies trying to own a market they think will be worth billions.
In Tim Berners-Lee’s original version, the web was meant to simplify sharing information. A key element was giving users control over presentation. Then came designers, who hated that idea. That battle between users’ preferences and browser makers’ interests continues to this day. What most people mean by the browser wars), though, was the late-1990s fight between Microsoft and Netscape, or the later burst of competition around smartphones. A big concern has long been market domination: a monopoly could seek to slowly close down the web by creating proprietary additions to the open standards and lock all others out.
Mouran, citing Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter, suggests that Google specifically has exploited its browser to increase search use (and therefore ad revenues), partly by merging the address and search bars. I know I’m not typical, but for me search remains a separate activity. Most of the time I’m following a link or scanning familiar sites. Yes, when my browser history fills in a URL, I guess you could say I’m searching the browser history, but to me the better analogy is scanning an array of daily newspapers. Many people *also* use their browser to access cloud-based productivity software and email or play online games, none of which is search.
Nor are chatbots, since they don’t actually *find* information; they apply mathematics and statistics to a load of ingested text and create sentences by predicting the most likely next word. This is why Emily Bender and Alex Hanna call them “synthetic text extruding machines” in their book, The AI Con. I am in the business of trying to make sense of the impact of fast-moving technology, or at least of documenting the conflicts it creates. The only chatbot I’ve found of any value for this – or for personal needs such as a tech issue – is Perplexity, and that’s because it cites (or can be ordered to cite) sources one can check. There is every difference in the world between just wanting an answer and wanting the background from which to derive an answer that may possibly be new.
In any event, Newton’s take is that a company that’s serious about search must build its own browser. Therefore: AI companies are building them. Hence these roundups. Mauron’s pitch: “Imagine a browser that acts as your research assistant, plans trips, sends emails, and schedules meetings. As AI models become more advanced, they’re capable of autonomously handling more complex tasks on your behalf. For tech companies, the browser is the perfect medium for realizing this vision.”
OK, I can see exactly what it does for tech companies. It gives them control over what information you can access, how you use it, and who and how much you pay for the services its agent selects (plus it gets a commission).
I can also see what it does for employers. My browser agent can call your browser agent and negotiate a meeting plan. Then they attend the meeting on our behalf and send us both summaries, which they ingest and file, later forwarding them to our bosses’ agents to verify we were at work that day. In between, they can summarize emails, and decide which ones we need to see. (As Charles Arthur quipped at The Overspill, “Could they…send fewer emails?”)
Remember when part of the excitement of the Internet was the direct access it gave to people who were formerly inaccessible? Now, we appear to be building systems to ensure that every human is their own gated community.
What part of this is good for users? If you are fortunate enough not to care about the price of anything, maybe it’s great to replace your personal assistant with an agentic web browser. Most of us have struggled along doing things for ourselves and each other. At Cybernews, Mayank Sharma warns that AI browsers’ intentional preemption of efforts to browse for yourself, filtering anything they deem “irrelevant”, threaten the open web. Newton quantifies the drop in traffic news publishers are already seeing from generative AI. Will we soon be complaining about information underload?
At Pluralistic last year, Cory Doctorow wrote about the importance of faithful agents: software that is loyal to us rather than its maker. He particularly focused on browsers, which have gone from that initial vision of user control to become software that spies on us and reports home. In Mauron’s piece, Perplexity openly hopes to use chats to build user profiles and eventually show ads.
The good news, such as it is, is that from what I’ve read in writing this, most of these companies hope to charge for these browsers – AI as a subscription service. So avoiding them is also cheaper. Double win.
Illustrations: John Tenniel’s drawing of Davy Jones, sitting on his locker (via Wikimedia, published in Punch, 1892 with the caption, “AHA! SO LONG AS THEY STICK TO THEM OLD CHARTS, NO FEAR O’ MY LOCKER BEIN’ EMPTY!!”
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Rather than allow Google to use its content as part of its “answer engine”, Holland Cycling has decided to close its site. So, a gated web with giant holes in it.
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