AI companies are increasingly turning to video as source material, according to John Herrman, a tech columnist at Intelligencer. Herrman describes how the internet’s how-to ecosystem shifted from websites and forums in the 90s and early 2000s to social media platforms in the 2010s, which were not well-suited to building archives of knowledge. By 2020, YouTube had become the internet’s default how-to resource, but searching became a process of watching, with information sometimes buried nine minutes into a fifteen minute clip. Starting in 2022, AI chatbots offered a different option; at first they provided plausible-sounding answers that were often wrong, then improved by citing sources, producing step-by-step instructions, and getting tougher questions right. They still failed on strange or specific queries, reflecting limits of the material on which they were trained.