According to a recent article in Slate, a daily news website focused on web-related topics, Quora, once known as the world's go-to knowledge sharing platform, is facing a crisis. In the past, Quora, a service that emphasized the value of good questions, garnering user trust and loyalty with its real-name policy and high-quality answers from experts, including former U.S. President Barack Obama and actor Ashton Kutcher, attracted 190 million monthly visitors. However, the recent emergence of AI has led to a mass exodus of its core users.

Quora's requirement for real names upon registration ensured a clear value structure of individuals asking questions and experts providing high-quality answers. However, Quora's decision to invest in AI chat platforms and its aggressive changes to service terms to allow user answers to be used for AI model training have raised concerns. This move, seen as an attempt to replace human-centricity with AI, has turned user sentiment towards Quora cold. It is predicted that Quora will soon become a ghost town populated only by AI chatbots.

While there is certainly a valid argument for the AI-driven restructuring of the entire process of asking and answering questions within digital communities, it's undeniable that we're already leveraging ChatGPT for various tasks, including translation, coding, and writing, based on the assumption that AI answers are trustworthy. However, it is equally important to acknowledge the fear, though perhaps not easy to articulate, that exists between the value structure of human-to-human questions and answers and the new value structure of human-to-AI questions and answers. This subtle difference is reflected in the fact that prominent Quora profiles, experts who have spent years building their profiles, are deleting their records and abandoning the platform.

Danish social scientist Charlie Strong emphasizes in his research on "Smartphones and the Future of Remembering" that new technological products are not simply things we use and possess, but also serve as a catalyst for reaffirming who we are and what we can do. He draws on the "extended mind theory" by Andy Clark and David Chalmers to argue that smartphones have become an essential element in the process of confirming human memory, extending beyond the confines of the brain alone.

Writing, at its core, is a technology that plays a significant role in changing or strengthening our biological memory. Now, with smartphones, we have the ability to add photos, digital audio recordings, and videos to writing, effectively introducing a system of knowledge and memory that is quite different from the biological capacity of our brains. The popular reality show "환승연애" (Transfer Love) introduces a space called the X-Room filled with elements that evoke memories of past relationships. This space features not only couple items and letters, but also videos captured on smartphones, showcasing moments of travel, birthdays, and dates, as well as screenshots of KakaoTalk message conversations.

Over the past two decades, the advent and improvement of smartphones have provided us with unlimited access to various media through which we can record and retrieve memories. This smartphone-based memory system restricts our ability to remember in traditional ways, while simultaneously enabling us to remember in new ways through platforms like cloud storage and Instagram, leading to unprecedented confusion. Having personally experienced conversations with research participants who, despite using smartphones with over 100GB of storage, frequently complained of a lack of storage space due to an inability to organize their photos.

Smartphone users tend to prefer app-based organization rather than web-based, leading to dispersed storage of memories. This makes organization increasingly difficult over time. Furthermore, the ability to capture and save every moment through photos and screenshots, while offering the potential to record countless experiences, ironically complicates memory formation and retrieval. This, as evidenced in studies on smartphones and memory, underscores the need to consider how technological advancement can create new and inherent difficulties intertwined with technology, rather than merely being a functional extension.

In this context, it can be helpful to pose ambiguous, philosophical questions centered on human beings rather than solely focusing on technology-driven questions about how new technologies will evolve the way we record and remember. Questions like "What will we record and remember, and how?" are questions that Quora, the platform that once dominated the web, should have asked itself when planning its investment and adoption of AI.

References

One of Our Best Websites Died While No One Was Looking

AI chatbot specialist Quora raises 100 billion won to respond to "GPT Store", to be allocated to chatbot developers

Smartphones and the Future of Remembering: Frictions, Problems, and Pathways⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠