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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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    7·
    3 days ago

    I wrote this comment after only reading the headline. After reading the article, i recognize it doesn’t fully fit, but here it goes anyways:

    The question is should anything save it?

    Probably not. Widespread internet (Facebook, Shitter, …) are rapidly turning into a right-wing propaganda instrument. Musk bought Twitter to practice “social engineering”, and basically every bigger tech platform has flanked Trump at inauguration. At this point, i expect that most people get more propaganda from their feed than actual knowledge or news.

    I guess it would be better to recognize that the internet is simply a dangerous tool if it can basically tell everybody what to think, and i’m worried that with the very low critical thinking skill that most people seem to have, that’s definitely a world we’re heading towards. (I’m searching for the 196 meme about the bald officer pretending to be an e-girl for people deployed to iran but i can’t find it).