Of late, one often hears that AI will launch a grand revolution of “intellectual levelling.” I could never quite declare myself opposed to the idea, but I confess I viewed it with a private lip curl, grounded in that confidence we all nurture in our own powers. When AI first came striding onto the stage—some even proclaiming it would replace the traditional search engine—I toyed with it now and then for novelty’s sake, yet in daily life, I still relied on the trusty techniques that had accompanied me for years.

I fancied myself a connoisseur of those “minor artifices” of classical search—exact quotes, wild-cards, Boolean spells of AND, OR, NOT; time filters, filetype: incantations, site: restrictions. These, to me, were second nature. More crucial still was the nose for how information is apt to present itself in prose: the knack of staging a multi-round duel of keywords, ever closing in on the quarry, never counting on a single, flawless shot.

Yet life delights in overturning us. Not long ago, I found myself reading Russian literature and trying to unearth certain Russian-language primary sources and critical essays. In that chase, I discovered that my cherished search craft, upon which I had long preened, could be wiped away with one stroke: I was back on the nursery slopes of the Internet—perhaps worse off, for pride is a heavy handicap.

First barrier: language. Even after hustling my query through machine translation into Russian, I trembled: were those phrases truly what Russian scholars would write? A semantic horseshoe is not enough; a misplaced nail may send the whole search cart into a ditch.

Next ambush: Russian names. They are renowned for their length and, shall we say, exuberant variety. Take the humble Алексей. Its Latin garb multiplies like Hydra heads: Alexey, Aleksey, Alexei—all common enough. The Russian passport, under GOST-R 2016, prefers Aleksei; the ALA-LC librarians of North America write Alekseĭ; ISO 9:1995 counsels Aleksej. Each claims the mantle of standard—only the standards differ. To net all scholarship on a single novel’s Alexei, one must chant this litany of spellings like some hermetic rite. And this without yet summoning the diminutives Алёша and Лёша, which roam freely through colloquy and half-serious critique.

Search in English? The web brims with English pages—but the snares remain: names alone devour half the day. Chinese search? Those who know the Chinese Internet harbour scant hope. Sources abound yet lie marooned on island domains—WeChat essays, private blogs—beyond the reach of ordinary engines. The Chinese web is an archipelago of “information wastelands,” sunk in darkness.

Besieged on every side, I watched my proud skills shrivel; the yield of useful pages was dishearteningly low.

At the point of surrender, AI rose again in my thoughts. I recalled that ChatGPT o3, by default, likes to invoke web search and often returns answers woven from many threads. Deep Research casts its net wider still, delivering neat dossiers of dozens of sources.

With nothing to lose, I laid my confusion before it. The result surprised me. AI shouldered the burdens of language and keywords, handed back links of quite decent vintage—many of them the very fruit I had been unable to pluck. Add in translation, and the once-cryptic Russian texts grew almost plain.

In that moment I grasped, vividly, what “lowering the bar to knowledge” might mean. Where personal skill in a field (for me: deep Russian-language retrieval) collapses to near-zero, AI is not a mere aid; it becomes a kind of empowerment. I no longer had to wrestle with each transliteration and keyword; AI bore that weight.

Indeed, on reflection, I have long since smuggled AI into my routine. When code misbehaves, I used to scour Stack Overflow, unearthing decade-old posts where some greybeard grumbled that the bug had never been fixed—those ghostly dialogues across time, both charming and bleak. Now I consult AI first. In such cases, I chiefly want to vet AI’s reasoning, not explore terra incognita. AI plays the seasoned lieutenant.

My literary episode, however, lifts my regard for AI search to another rung. In realms of extreme information asymmetry—where tongue, expertise, or training bar the way—AI serves less as assistant than as enabler. Tasks that once demanded a long apprenticeship now lie within casual reach.

A not-entirely-apt analogy: manual deep search in an alien domain can resemble an “NP problem”—finding the solution itself is hard. AI, by brute pattern and memory, nudges the experience closer to “P”—the user’s labour shifts to verifying the plausibility of AI’s candidate answers.

Thus, the phrase intellectual levelling acquires a new savour. AI’s significance does not reside in bestowing equal raw intellect, but in acting as a learned and patient guide who, when we confront unfamiliar knowledge, linguistic walls, or lack of training, lowers the threshold dramatically.

It irons out gulfs created by circumstance, allowing more of us to stand on something like equal footing as we reach for what once looked remote. My attitude, formerly tinged with disdain, has warmed into a measure of hope. The future remains opaque, yet on the road to understanding, I have gained an unexpected companion.