I remember back when I was in college the WWW was barely released and search was in its infancy. If you were doing a research paper, trying to use the WWW to search for papers on the topic was laughably useless. Instead you would go to the university library (which still used card catalogs!) and make an appointment with these people who had access to some search system (I can’t remember what it was called). You would sit down with them and explain what you were researching and they would craft search queries in the query language this system used and read over the results with you to see if they sounded promising. They would tweak the query based on your feedback until you got the results you wanted. Then they would print out the results and you could go elsewhere in the library to lookup the papers. It cost money per search, but the university covered the cost.

I wonder if we might see something similar with these ai generation tools. People who become experts at crafting the queries to get back the results you are looking for act as intermediaries.