1w ago

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

www.economist.com

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.

Archive : https://archive.ph/nhrYS

56 comments

So, it’s not killing the web, people are still using it, but it’s hurting the companies who relied on business astrology (ie SEO) to be effective.
That’s interesting because I think the SEO’d-to-shit web, where you search and get hundreds of results pointing to the same stupid site, is what “killed the web”. Big shrug.
- 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.
  
  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.
- there's AEO (answer engine optimization) now though 🙃
- why do you say it's not killing the web? How many people are on lemmy because of the enshitiffication of privately owned social media?
  
  Because this is what recipe sites used to look like, which was a person, posting recipes they had, in their words, so that you could get the information. Could the site look a bit better? Sure, there are accessibility issues, but it’s honest, to the point and gives you what you’re looking for.
  This is the first result on Duckduckgo for “Garlic bread recipe”, which contains umpteen paragraphs of irrelevant information about Tony, a ton of great pictures of garlic bread, but holy fucking shit, they’re both the same content, one is just insufferable and ridiculous and the other one gives you what you’re looking for.
  I’ve been in web design for as long as the web’s been around, basically. Obviously what would be nice is a better laid out site that gives access to some of the beautiful pictures that are in the 2nd article with the content of the 1st. But you can’t write an article with as few words in the first and ever hope to be ranked above another with “more content”. SEO has driven the web to extrude out content for attention that can be better dragged across advertisements.
  For someone just looking to quickly understand how to make a good garlic bread, I miss the old web dearly.
  re: enshittification of social media, social media isn’t the world wide web, so I am not understanding how that relates, but that said, I dearly also miss the forum-based internet and IRC as primary ways of communicating with each other. You were a lot less likely to run into all the giant personality conflicts that happen on Reddit/Lemmy because you weren’t aggregated in with literally everyone to comment on literally everything, you were organized around niche interests.
  So I guess my question back to you would be, how many of us are on Lemmy/Reddit because that’s all that’s practically left for us?
  
  Because what is dying is one part of the web, or more specifically, a certain type of product that is served over the web.
  Which I, for one, am very, VERY glad is dying. There's an infestation of SEO driven sites with basically a lot of word diarrhea and metric tons of ads, and finally at the bottom, the single sentence you were looking for.
  A pox on those sites, let them die.
Capitalism is killing the web. AI is just the latest problem.
- As long as net neutrality exists, I don't think capitalism can kill the web.
  It can force it to change, evolve, shift. But that is exactly the web's DNA, it has done so ever since the beginning, and that's not a threat.
  
  Guess what a court ruled against back in January?
The web was here before greedy sacks of shit monetized everything and it'll still be here after they go broke.
- Right? If anything I think the web is having its renaissance moment with distributed/federated platforms like piefed, lemmy, kbin/mbin, bookwyrm, peertube, mastodon, pixelfed, misskey, matrix, XMPP, Deltachat, nostr, etc.
  
  I wouldn't call it "renaissance" but rather "decentralization", "democratization" or "unshittification"
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.
- what if consumerism goes down because people have less money and then companies realize that advertisement doesn't pay off anymore?
  
  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.
sigh Here we go again with another "the web is dying" piece from the corporate propaganda machine.
Look, I get it - traffic numbers are down, ad revenue is tanking, and the surveillance capitalism model that's been propping up the "free" web is finally showing cracks. But can we please stop pretending this is some unprecedented crisis?
The web has been "dying" since social networks, then mobile apps, now AI chatbots. Each time, the same voices cry about the end times while completely missing the actual structural problems. The issue isn't that AI is "stealing" content - it's that we built an entire internet economy on the absurd premise that eyeballs = money, and now we're shocked when the eyeballs find more efficient ways to get information.
What's really happening here is rent-seeking behavior disguised as innovation protection. These "licensing deals" between News Corp and OpenAI? That's just the old gatekeepers trying to maintain their position in a shifting landscape. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of small domains that actually make the web interesting get left out entirely.
The technical solutions are way more promising than the legal theater. Cloudflare's pay-as-you-crawl system? Now that's thinking like an engineer instead of a lawyer. Set proper rate limits, charge for bot access, let humans browse free. Simple.
But here's what The Economist won't tell you: the web isn't dying, it's decentralizing. While everyone's panicking about Google traffic, we've got ActivityPub, IPFS, self-hosted everything. The corporate web might be having an existential crisis, but the actual web - the one built by people who care about information sharing rather than ad impressions - is doing just fine.
Stack Overflow seeing fewer questions because AI answers coding queries? Good. Maybe now we'll get better documentation instead of the same "how do I center a div" asked 50,000 times. Quality over quantity was always the point.
The funniest part is watching Google try to have it both ways - claiming the web is expanding by 45% while simultaneously building AI overviews that eliminate the need to visit those expanding sites. Peak corporate doublethink.
Want to save "the web"? Stop depending on centralized platforms for discovery. Self-host. Use RSS feeds. Support decentralized protocols. The technical infrastructure for a resilient, user-controlled web already exists. We just need to stop pretending that what's good for Google's shareholders is good for the internet.
- Look, I appreciate your argument and generally agree with it, but it also kinda smells like an AI wrote it. If so, I appreciate the irony. Either way, have an upvote.
  
  I appreciate reading comments that are well written. If an AI was used to create the argument in its entirety, or edit it, so be it. What matters is content and context. If it's eloquent, without being obnoxiously verbose, that's a bonus. It doesn't feel like a lot of filler bullshit was added. ETA: I want to clarify, flooding the web with AI bots to astroturf agendas is not cool.
The web was built by people sharing things with each other, without expecting to get paid for it. That part of the web still exists, if you know where to look. Even before AI, hyper-aggressive SEO made it so those sites ended up on the fourth or fifth page of search results. Now those who used that SEO to get clicks are discovering what it's like to get bypassed. Good.
- I wish I knew where to look!
  
  That's the problem. Back in the day you could use a search engine to find this stuff. Not any more.
Ah cooked the golden goose and now complaining. It’s as bad as cinemas/Hollywood, they got greedy took advantage and when people moved away wondered why. Make a product people like and they will use it. They don’t care they are losing viewers. They care they arnt making money.
I fully expect the return and rise of curated micro-webs full of paid human created content. Less quantity, higher quality.
Just look at This Week In Videogames. The only reason it exists is to bring back "the OG" gaming publication experience. There are others starting to go this route too, like 404 Media.
- So we might be able to go back to internet of the 90s? Honestly, that might be for the best, imo. Small blogs, forums and maybe fediverse. Screw internet that is essentially a few monolithic silos that are now just full of crap.
Perhaps some kind of fediweb that allows sites to rank other sites for trustworthiness. Then as a user you mark a few sites as trusted, and use their judgement to find more sites.
- Bring back web rings!
  
  Yep. That's a web ring.
  
  Kind of, but with automation. So if you trust site A 90%, and site A trusts site B 90%, then from your PoV, site B has 81% trust* (which you can choose to replace with your own trust rating, if you want).
  Could have applications in building a new kind of search engine even.
  I'm just guessing how the maths would work, it probably requires a little more sophisticated system that that, such as starting sites at 50% and only increasing or decreasing the rating based on sites you already trust.
I honestly don’t care. There’s like five companies running the whole internet now and they’re all shit. Burn it down.
- There’s like five companies running the whole internet now
  techno-imperialism, in a way. they command the whole internet
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).
No.
Edit - I mean. We could get rid of all the techbro oligarchs. Break up their companies with antitrust. And heavily regulate AI. But that's about as likely as everyone implicated in the Epstein files giving themselves up to the police.
They just gonna put ads on chatbots
- Some are trying
- I thought they were the ads already
Nah
p e a c e
The thing is, I love being able to discuss things until I understand them. I love the way AI can collate data and present it to me in a pretty bow.
What I don't like is that it's been allowed carte blanche on everything on the internet. The internet should've been safe from AI. It should've been limited to training on things in the public domain.
Perhaps then, we'd see stupid ideas not being patented and copyrights not continually extended via dubious means.
Not AI. Capitalism.
The web was well on its way to the hereafter long before generative AI came along.
- AI is the tool that capitalism needed to actually kill it. Before that, the internet was never on any trajectory into unusability as long as you has money and fortitude to deal with ads and privacy invasions (or an ad blocker).
  Now writing absolute garbage is so cheap that the internet is being flooded with it, diluting all the correct and useful information to the point that it can actually be hard to sift through and find it.
Even gopher is still pretty much alive after being pronounced dead for a long, long time... so, I am not worried much
Terrible, we can't track people with cookies and ads anymore, the internet is about to break!
If this is breaking the internet then please let it be broken.
I guess the difficulty of monetizing writing and news is similar to the difficulty of monetizing software development.
Somehow, for the last 20 years, monetizing software development has worked well enough. People worked for Google or Facebook or idk who and they earned wages that way. Around 2015, i could notice lots of programming jobs being outsourced to India. In 2022, all big tech firms have issues rounds of mass layoffs. Last week, i've seen numerous posts on various platforms saying that it's getting more difficult to find a job after graduating college in CS.
AI is threatening white-collar jobs. But it's not just AI that's a singular phenomenon here, rather you'd have to look at it in a wider context: AI basically copy-pastes what it has been trained on, while combining it into new material. This wouldn't be possible if there wasn't large amounts of training texts available. In a certain sense, once there's enough reference material available, AI can always copy these templates and generate works based on them. As such, only a finite training heap of material is ever necessary to produce by human's hands.
The situation is a bit different for news articles as they have to do research in the real-world, and that cannot simply be done by an AI. Still, monetizing texts is more difficult in a world where inflation is high and people have less money to spend on consumerism, ads are getting less effective, and newspapers struggle to be independent.
Perhaps if the major sites and search engines had not spent the last decade filling the results with ads and SEO'd click bait trash people wouldn't be embracing AI as a way around that mess. Of course it's only a matter of time before the AI results get "optimised" as well.
Edit: not to mention, cookie prompts, notification requests, newsletter sign up requests, pay walls, and a host of other nags.
The internet was a mistake. We know that now. People have never been more connected yet never been more lonely. It's a trap, a false oasis. AI could kill it and I'd sleep happy. There has to be a way to make the tech work FOR us instead of AGAINST us.
Wow. When I think of all the things I've read about that were "killing" the web it's a wonder my browser even works. And yet here we are.
let it die.
the internet as we know is dying.
A new net will be born from it's ashes.
Either bitch about it, or let's make the future net to our liking.
those who do not adapt die, the one universal law.
- It's not really dying as much as being stolen by big companies to be honest.
Can anything save it? Yes: REGULATION. Regulate all this shit (AI, online advertising, webcrawlers) down to the pixel if needed. Fine the companies and their CEOs into 3 generations of bankruptcy.
But, since politicians are either too stupid, too old, too corrupt, or any combination thereof, nothing's gonna happen.

56 comments