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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  • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
    20·
    4 days ago

    Yeah I agree with that. SEO was the worst thing to happen to internet users, where authentic websites, blogs and forums were buried by slop websites.

    • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Using the web before search engines were really a thing was way more wholesome, following interesting links and stumbling upon wonderful sites (and awful ones too of course). It was based on trust in which site was pointing you where.

      Then along came Google and others who supplanted those trusted links and now they are reaping the whirlwind. I’m hoping we go back to curating our own strange collections of web gems.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        Using the web with only hyperlinks and web rings or BBS links was good when it was just a place to waste time or ask and wait for an answer to a specific question, I think it would have stayed mostly that way without good search.

        However, one of the most powerful and convenient features of computers is the ability to search for things, and we all wanted to be able to find something we didn’t know or couldn’t remember the location of. You could search bookmarks if you saved it, but half the pages were title “home” or other similarly useless names.

        Alta vista was amazing when it first launched, and about a month later was fully of keyword stuffed garbage. We worked around it, but then google came around and fixed it. For a little bit.

        There’s going to have to be another search solution, and it’ll have to learn how to ignore LLM slop, but since LLMs are going to also need to ignore their own slop if they want to train any more, it’s going to either solve itself, or we’re at it’s peak now.

        Search is actually the thing I’m missing most in Lemmy. I haven’t been able to find posts even if I’ve just viewed them a day before unless I voted or bookmarked it.