1/ OpenAI’s new Operator agent is a “research preview of an agent that can use its own browser to perform tasks for you.” This was the logical next step in “AI agents” technology, and it prob will be useful for tasks like shopping, or researching something. Initially, I was concerned about AI becoming “the primary user of the web now,” as one AI newsletter posited. But on reflection it seems more suited to task-oriented web browsing, & there are many other aspects of the web that are not that.
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2/ social networking, for one, but also reading an article for pleasure (or, more likely these days, consuming a short-looping video). So I think the ‘human web’ will be fine, for now.
Ok, so how does it potentially impact my career as a tech journalist and writer? Well, I think Operator (and similar web-browsing AI agents) could be useful for me in some ways. e.g. browsing my Mastodon feed and highlighting what it thinks are the most useful tech posts by people I follow.
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3/ Another e.g.: going out on the web and doing some preliminary research for an article or book I’m writing.
Does Operator make it less likely that people will “consume” my content on the web? Maybe, for articles that I write where a potential reader just wants some action points about a product or trend. But that was already happening with the likes of Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews.
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4/ If anything, Operator — and AI agents in general — reinforces that writers like me need to double-down even more on our own personal experiences (with tech or tech culture, in my case) and one's personality (which has always been paramount with bloggers).
So yes, AI agents are here and will be a big trend this year and going forward. But I don't think they're an existential threat to the human web...just yet.
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