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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  • staircase@programming.dev
    3·
    3 days ago

    as I understand it, you’re saying the web was attacked by SEO, and that sounds entirely correct, but I don’t follow how that means AI isn’t also killing the web.

    tbh I don’t have the energy to contribute meaningfully to this conversation so I’ll stop before I say something silly

    • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      3 days ago

      The two things are related is what I am saying. The SEO web resulted in inflating pages with nonsense content that is needed to better appeal for advertisement revenue. This results in the results of web searches being clogged with in-genuine content that is meant to appeal to google’s algorithm and not to/by/from actual people.

      The idea of “the web is dying” would mean that the internet has gotten so clogged with this kind of junk that no one even bothers to use it anymore. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, for better or worseª, people are getting parsed LLM search results at the top of their query which is summarizing the “content-rich” articles that are built for google, and getting people to the answers they want faster.

      What that’s doing is making the idea of putting together this elaborate peacock of a website to appeal to Google a lot of wasted effort, since no one is going to those pages if they can get the answer more quickly. Whether this sounds like a bad thing to you I suppose depends on how much you value the pre-AI but post-SEO period of the internet, which I guess I don’t have much nostalgia for.

      FWIW I’ve gotten some fantastic help from search engine LLMs with respect to some broad coding tasks but i have always said i don’t think it’s taken any longer than it would have for me to go to StackOverflow and parse through answers on my own, especially after tweaking and working with the LLM to refine its answer. I don’t think LLMs are magic, I think they’re often slapped into poorly designed products and overly applied but can have some limited use.

      ª (Often worse. I got an unasked-for LLM search result on DDG today for ‘What is my IP address’, a question an LLM could not possibly help or answer without being hooked into a lot of other things, and is just a colossal waste of time and energy, and is really bad design)