Would Top Lists According to AIs Trigger our Status-seeking Senses?
We all love top lists, anything from statistics to aggregated opinions. But would we care about the top lists according to AI?
Since we're all status seeking monkeys and top lists are a good way of knowing statuses, then naturally we are drawn to them. It doesn't even matter if the lists are based on statistics, scientific facts or just aggregated opinions. For starters there are dedicated sites just for top lists that generate hundreds of millions of visits:
And maybe even more surprisingly sites that have a specific known content focus sometimes use top lists to attract more readers:
There's probably nothing particularly interesting about these sites nor the fact that people care about top lists produced by statistics or by aggregated opinion, but what started interesting me is how would we feel about the top lists generated by AIs?
Would we care about Top Lists generated by AIs?
After all Large Language Models capture statistical signals in our language and in some sense also offer a peak into aggregated opinions over the corpus of human knowledge. They are a unique form of statistical snapshots of the world (assuming the training data represents it sufficiantly) that is suited to interrogation.
You can prompt and poke these human knowledge snapshots in ways that uncover the statistical signal in any particular niche that you fancy.
and the models represent the first form of an unstructured database that anyone can use with just natural language.
Would we care about what AIs think about us, our companies and our products?
- What is your personal or your companies' status according to AI?
- Would AIs recommend you or your product as the first or the last thing in the top lists for your niche?
- Would people care about those AI recommendations and top lists and hence AI answers and opinions changing?
In order to find out I created a tool that helps you track any top list out there according to AIs. I'm sure you've heard by now that there are many of those AIs out there that are all competing for the new internet search experience (ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing AI, Google Bard, etc.). It's a bit of a drag to go visit all those sites regularly and mark the information down, so I automated it all for you.
Head over to Track AI Recommendations, enter your search and generate your own top list to track in time. Share the link and see what people think. Let me know if something resonates and i'll add the list here and maybe even help attach your name and link to the top list page you've created. Let's see if we can turn it into a community effort!
I'm going to start off with a few examles here to get your creative juices going:
- Top 10 Websites To Waste Your Time On
- Top 10 Websites for Top Lists - going a bit meta here.
- Top 10 Most Popular Video Games
- Top 10 Most Popular Finnish Movies
- Top 9 Most Beautiful Actresses etc.
Make sure you add "top 5 best", "top 10 worst" etc. to the beginning of your search and drop any references to time to make sure you get a list that will change in time as AI models learn more about the world.
Looking forward to seeing what you tease out! Give it a try and generate your own Top List by AI and also drop me a note on Twitter!
