I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.
My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:
I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.
And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:
As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.
[…]
Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.
The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]
I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).
On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.
As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.
That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.
I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.
I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.