Is AI the new FAQ?

Tyler Cowen writes at Marginal Revolution:

I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author reference the Morley reforms of 1909.

I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”

Then I asked “did those apply to all parts of India?”

You can just keep on going. I’ll sa it again: “The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.”

Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally. This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever. And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Councils_Act_1909

Back a third of a century ago in the UseNet era of the Internet, just before the World Wide Web, a staple was the Frequently Asked Questions list. The idea was that before you, as a newcomer, clogged up a UseNet dialogue with tired questions that had been asked 50 times before, you should read this FAQ to get up to speed.

This struck me as an excellent format. Smart people have been writing FAQs since Plato, whose Socratic dialogues can be thought of as superbly dramatized FAQs.

And it seemed to appeal to a lot of people on the Internet in the 1990s too. Of course, the modal Internet user in 1992 was probably a grad student who was aware that other smart people had asked a lot of interesting questions before he had. (If there's anything grad school is good for, it's teaching you that there have been wise guys before you.)

But then, for some reason, FAQs went out of fashion. In part because the Internet got more democratic, but partly, I presume, due to swings in fashion.

Nowadays, you see FAQs on some commercial and bureaucratic website these days, but you almost never see viral tweets advising you to check out this banging FAQ.

It kind of sounds like AI is reviving the FAQ. Now, Tyler is so smart that he benefits from being able to ask AI his own sometimes unique questions. But most of us would benefit simply from a revival of the FAQ format.