The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet

Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the bosses of big media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that they faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.”

Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that “content” publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic.

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

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  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    4 days ago

    That was entirely predictable. First, social media companies earned billions from other people’s content, and now AI companies are doing the same.

    But hey, it’s all good as long as the bots generate ad clicks and the companies that place ads don’t realize that the traffic is generated by bots — since they usually rely unquestioningly on the KPIs of Meta, Google, and the like, this will certainly take a while.

    /s, mostly.

      • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Indeed. From a macroeconomic perspective, it can certainly become a problem if people no longer have enough money to buy anything. This then quickly affects the advertising industry since companies need to cut costs.

        However you look at it, I don’t think there’s any angle from which it would seem sustainable to concentrate the majority of capital in the hands of just a few.

        Since AI is ensuring that the already precarious earning opportunities of content creators are now being transferred even further to a few corporations, this technology will only contribute to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

        I don’t think that this can go on forever – not economically and certainly not socially.

          • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            No objections.

            However, I think AI should also be regulated to compensate those who made all that possible in the first place - all those that contributed content to the underlying datasets or more like had their content put in those datasets without their consent.

            Otherwise, in my opinion, there will be less and less high-quality content on the internet because it will simply no longer be possible to earn money from it. Of course, there will always be people who create content without monetary intentions, but there are also many people whose profession it is (writers, journalists, artists, people in the entertainment industry, and so on).