Mainstream AI tools rely on large sets of data that they are trained on. This data, often websites, posts, comments and the like, has been created by humans (for the most part).
Reports suggest that part of the Web population is shifting towards using AI first for any of their tasks and there are good reasons (and some not so good ones) for that.
On the positive side, it is dead simple. You get an answer right away and do not have to wade through different websites in the hope that they offer the answer. Links are provided to verify the claims. And this works reasonably well for many requests.
The downside to this is that AI is still hallucinating. In plain terms, AI may return information that is inaccurate, plain wrong, or created out of thin air. That is bad, especially if the information could end up in disaster. My bet is that most users are unaware of this and take information at face value. It is also changing how the Web is used.
The consequences are severe for website publishers who rely on ads, at least those who do not have the pull to sell their data to AI companies. Traffic will drop. Google is pushing AI overviews, and this leads to less visits. Google says that this is not the case, that searchers click on links in AI overviews, but this appears exaggerated.
In the next couple of years, websites will receive less and less traffic from search. All search engines move to AI content and the reason is simple: this keeps users on their site. Means, they get to keep all the ad Dollar.
Google just introduced its AI into Chrome Canary. This too will keep users inside Chrome and Google’s vast network of services.
Granted, some sites will not be affected by this. If you offer a service that AI can’t replicate, you are likely golden. Think of downloads, streaming media, good journalism, user interactions, games and more.
The traditional newspaper or blog will have a hard time, unless it is very special. Other services, too. Think of all those flight and hotel booking sites. Agentic AI might do that directly in the browser or on a website, no need to go through dozens of sites yourself.
Yes, aggregators like Booking or Trip exist already, but AI can replicate that without issues.
Many will stop publishing or be pulled from the Internet entirely. Less traffic means less ad Dollar means less money for paying writers, hosting and administration. It is a downward spiral.
AI won’t know that certain “things” exist
But this also means less content that AI can vacuum up. If no one writes about a certain topic anymore, AI won’t know about it. It will be as if it does not exist at all.
So, when the last independent games review site shuts down, AI may not have any info about the latest games anymore. Yes, this is a bit exaggerated, as there may be reviews on Reddit or other community sites.
Still, less content means less nuanced information about a topic.
Closing Words
If you operate a website, unless you are a big corpo with AI deals already, then you might want to search for different monetization options. Reliance on ads may not cut it anymore in the future. Expect more sites to go subscription-based. Some might ask for donations. Fatigue will kick in and money can only be spend once on something.
Again, I may be a bit too pessimistic about the outlook, but the Web as we know it is changing dramatically.
Now You: what is your take on AI taking over the world and destroying the Internet as we know it? Let me know in the comment section below.
“But this also means less content that AI can vacuum up. If no one writes about a certain topic anymore, AI won’t know about it. It will be as if it does not exist at all.”
They will take it from theirs walled gardens. Google will parse YouTube videos and upcoming “Google Answers”. Grok will parse every post on X. Meta will get stuff from Instagram posts and so on. They will also scrub websites that do not depend on traffic like Governments, Major News Organizations and top shopping reviews from Walmart and Amazon.
Symbiotic Relationships–first idea that comes to mind.
The headline question, “Where is AI getting its content from when many publishers stop publishing?” implies AI will automatically exploit Internet resources, creating a “parasitic” relationship.
Not necessarily the case. For clarity: “Symbiotic relationships are close, long-term interactions between different species, which can be mutualistic (both benefit), commensalistic (one benefits, the other is unaffected), or parasitic (one benefits at the expense of the other). These relationships are essential for the survival and health of many organisms in ecosystems.”
1. What type of symbiotic relationship does advertising have with the Internet?
Advertising and the Internet have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship.
2. What type of symbiotic relationship does AI have with advertising?
The relationship between AI and advertising can also be described as mutualistic.
3. What type of symbiotic relationship does AI and the Internet have?
The relationship between AI and the Internet can be characterized as mutualistic.
4. Could the symbiotic relationship between AI and the Internet ever turn into a parasitic one?
While the current relationship between AI and the Internet is largely mutualistic, there are potential scenarios where it could evolve into a parasitic one.
5. Could the symbiotic relationship between AI and advertising ever turn into a parasitic one?
Yes, the symbiotic relationship between AI and advertising could potentially evolve into a parasitic one under certain conditions.
Question #5 was more important for me, and the answer generated by AI was infinitely more disconcerting than the answer generated by Question #4. The potential for user exploitation and the near certainty of destroying the users’ ability “to create and value unique ideas, perspectives and innovation” was far more threatening than any AI insight given in the answer for Question #4.
Yes, invitation to copy the questions into AI and generate the answers; some sound information was generated for me.
Mutualistic : beneficial relationship between two species.
Stating that the Internet, advertising and AI form mutualistic couples is axiomatic and, confronted to good sense, for the least opened to debate. AI and advertisement may be more obvious nevertheless, but that’s about it 🙂
In particular, “Advertising and the Internet have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship” leaves me stunned immaculate. You must be joking unless such an exotic deployment of nonsense was yet another AI hallucination. I’ve read, seen, lived many things in my life but this is really in my TOP 100. Good Lord.
Please let me know where you’ve dug to find such questionable assertions
OK, the sources of the answers was an AI Chatbot, I hadn’t understood at first.
Just asked Mistral le Chat, with ‘Think’ option activated, and received the same answers as those you report, and my answer to the le Chat remained : axiomatic answers, no arguments.
start —
1. What type of symbiotic relationship does advertising have with the Internet?
The relationship between advertising and the Internet is mutualistic, where advertising benefits from the vast reach and targeting capabilities of the Internet, and the Internet benefits from advertising revenues that support free content and services.
2. What type of symbiotic relationship does AI have with advertising?
AI and advertising share a mutualistic relationship. AI enhances advertising effectiveness through data-driven insights and automation, while advertising provides a rich source of data and financial incentives that drive AI innovation.
3. What type of symbiotic relationship does AI and the Internet have?
AI and the Internet have a mutualistic relationship. AI benefits from the vast amounts of data available on the Internet, and the Internet benefits from AI through improved services, personalization, and user experience enhancements.
4. Could the symbiotic relationship between AI and the Internet ever turn into a parasitic one?
Yes, the relationship between AI and the Internet could potentially become parasitic if AI applications start consuming Internet resources excessively or degrade the quality and reliability of Internet services.
5. Could the symbiotic relationship between AI and advertising ever turn into a parasitic one?
Yes, the relationship between AI and advertising could become parasitic if AI-driven advertising practices start exploiting user data unethically or negatively impact user experience through intrusive advertising methods.
— end
Let me laugh. Where is intelligence in such nonsense, where?
AI is like Apex predator that is released in new biological system. It will consume most of the other large species, and then the ecosystem will have to return to some kind of equilibrium,
Did I do better analogy than your chatbot?
@Tom Hawack–good job! I’m glad someone took the time to begin research because Martin’s question is a good one. Symbiotic relationships–gHacks is a great example if you have followed its history over the past decade. At one point, Martin reached out to his readers and informed them that if they continued using Ad Blockers and failed to donate through Patreon, the site would be sold. He explained the costs involved. It’s a good example of a mutualistic relationship that turned parasitic. The readers, the consumers, became parasitic. They gorged themselves on Martin’s high quality tech articles and never provided something in return so the site could thrive. Hence, the site was sold, and we now have a gHacks site that resembles, for the most part, an AI bot. FreewareGenius is another site that was superb; it’s now a dead site, consumed by parasitic readers. In theory, the relationship between the reader and the site should be “mutualistic.” There is no “free lunch” in Nature.
“The Internet benefits from advertising revenues that support free content and services.”
Each reader willingly donates or allows a few ads to appear in return for quality information. That isn’t happening. Could AI driven advertising have saved the old gHacks forum and stature as the premier tech site for advanced users? Probably not. There are those who think anything and everything on the Internet is a “freebie” they are entitled to by divine inheritance–or some such idiocy.
Do research Martin’s title as well. What will happen when, eventually, AI has become parasitic and new information isn’t available? The relationship between AI and the Internet will then be a parasitic one; AI will have consumed all the resources from which it once benefited leaving a vast void, an old carcass. Sites will either dissolve into nothingness or be nothing more than sites loaded with advertising for commodities. Or the sites will be “deepfake” sites committed to spreading endless dribble.
I think Martin already hints at one of the AI answers: “AI applications [are already] consuming Internet resources excessively or degrading the quality and reliability of Internet services.”
Example–https://windowsforum.com/
“Advertising and the Internet have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship” leaves me stunned immaculate.” Not sure what would leave a person stunned by the comment. It’s a cardinal rule in marketing–target your audience. The use of AI in advertising makes targeting individual readers [consumers] a dream come true. No longer do the same ads appear for every user; but every user is presented with only those advertisements that ensure a “click” because they are appropriate and fulfill a real or imagined need. At what point does this become “exploitation”? Don’t know. Amazon already uses the AI model. Quite effective–sometimes appreciated.
For me, most AI results are invaluable. I am using ChatGPT, sometimes Mistral. DDG–duck.ai–offers several models. It’s a time saver, offering a smorgasbord of information that usually leads to more questions rather than answers.
@VioletMoon, I don’t think that an E=mc^2 is in the same register as an “I think therefor I am”. What I mean is that applying a mathematical, a mathematically-driven approach to describe and, worse, to explain reality beyond its hyper-rational boundaries is not a valid one. Life is not an equation, at least I don’t think so, even should all parameters of a given scheme be included, provided we’d ever be able to achieve such a pretentious and somewhat arrogant aim, aim which seems to be that of AI : having all the ingredients and using them in their correct hierarchies, order and proportions doesn’t make you a fine cuisine cooker. There is more to it. Ultimately neither do I believe that all the mysteries of life are sleeping in our human brains, waiting to be wakened up. We’ll never go any further than realizing the amount of our ignorance : no progress without humility, which is the exact opposite of an AI-driven world. Beyond intelligence reigns wisdom.
Internet becoming a “Centernet” as AI is taking over the world?
Presently this is factual and enforced by users who seek quick responses to their queries rather diversity form which they’d have to think to acknowledge, compare and occasionally choose. These users seem to be a majority : how to combat invaders when the inhabitants welcome and applause them?
Monopolizing by means of centralizing in an all-in-one package is a business credo. This credo is incompatible with free competition (unless to consider that competition remains amid the strongest whilst the others disappear for other reasons than talent, which is an intellectual challenge) as well and perhaps before all with the very nature of life and intelligence : diversity and inter-connections amid its components (just like brain cells). In other words, as I see it, greed is destroying the intelligence of mankind.
How all this will carry on? Speculating doesn’t make much sens. I only hope that if it is not ethics that come to rescue, at least punched intelligence will make a come-back and defeat the absurd environment lead by profit at any price so to say, the price being a humanity’s intelligence and consequently its ability to think freely. Extra note free of charge : is freedom still the first value of humanity, is being imprisoned in a golden jail more attractive than being free in a rotten sleeping-bag under a rotten bridge? If I were a teacher I’d ask my pupils : describe your conception of freedom.
AI is getting it’s “facts” from more idiots then intellectuals, who in turn get their “facts” from AI. That’s the downward spiral that concerns me.
I think there is a term for it: “AI Inbreeding”. Somebody made an experiment to create a picture based on Mona Liza and then 30 times consecutively make an AI picture based on previous iteration of AI Mona Liza picture. Result was freaky. With each iteration, Mona Liza looked more like a Hindu deity with some cosmic background and weird eyes everywhere.
I have to disagree about intellectuals. Maybe 10 years ago, I would take word of intellectual over some idiot 100% of the time. Now. You have to check each “intellectual” individually to see if they are giving the facts, or they have an agenda. In the worlds of Denzel Washington: “If you are not reading news, you are uninformed. Bit if you’re reading news, you are misinformed”.
@boris, @Tachy …
@Tachy, not sure “intellectuals” (I assume the term is to be understood as “educated”, hence a way of processing acquired knowledge) get their “facts” from AI or, if they do, it doesn’t mean they consider them as factual (true) unless they forget to process what they discover : “Culture is what remains once you’ve forgotten it all” as we say in French, in which case they are more memory tanks than thinkers.
@boris, a comment being both pertinent and joyful doesn’t happen every day : still split between laughs and thoughts when reading you 🙂 So true what you write. Your second paragraph deepens my thoughts.
– First, I wouldn’t oppose an intellectual to an idiot, when the former may be the latter and the latter smarter than the former yet labelled as an idiot on the account of a vast ignorance.
– Secondly, “intellectuals” seldom provide facts, they rather discuss them, debate over their sources and implications, to make it short try to position them in the eternal cause to consequence chains. When an individual claims reality and arguments (or not, which is even worse) on the ground of sophisticated brain-teasers in order to pretend he has the luggage to assert what he says/writes has the required background of sovereign intellectualism is not bullshit … that individual is definitely *not* and intellectual 🙂
– Thirdly. Denzel Washington’s assertion is funny when it could be more if less binary. “if you’re reading news, you are misinformed” is an audacious statement. I’d personally prefer something like “if you’re reading news, you are informed of what is reported, only”. Why condemn a source of lying systematically when it happens to lie, or to mistake? Judgements free of the tiny window of doubt imprison our thoughts. Not to mention that an eternal and definitive judgement regarding news may prevent us from reality when the news appears to be true. I’d prefer a “standby” position : remain informed but do not take provided information for granted : doubt, doubt and doubt again, and that does not mean nor imply to believe the opposite, tha means only a “maybe”, or “maybe not” in our very own process of information, at least until a true, authentic evidence vanishes all certitudes, counter-certitudes and even doubts. Now : what is authentic evidence? That’s another topic, I’m afraid 🙂
Denzel had a trial or some kind of investigation, and newspapers were really not kind to him. And later it was proven that all stuff in newspapers about him was wrong.
About “trusting” Intellectuals. An example is “modern art” where banana taped to the wall was lauded like the top achievement and was sold for million of dollars. Or paint thrown on the canvas randomly or black spots on gray canvas or (what I heard) broken toilet in some exposition.
Modern literature is pretty much the same. I do not know about your country but in good old USofA bookstores (whatever survived) and Walmarts/Targets are drowning in smut. And not even good smut. Some Vampires or Robots or anything Paranormal having relationship with porky women.
Maybe not mistake intellectuals with so-called elites. If some modern art achievements which happen to be arguable in terms of aesthetics and totally senseless are lauded it is more by elites and investors than by intellectuals 🙂 Concerning literature here in France we endure as well a trend towards easy to read / feelgood creations, but this time the culprit is the reader himself who is increasingly interested by what we called in the old times “roman de gare” (“train station novels”), even if quality literature has its faithful audience (what is “quality”?). In the scope of literature I must admit that intellectuals happen to consider themselves more as members of the elite than as thinkers, but this has always been the case in France : the prestige of belonging to an elite as in past centuries the prestige of being admitted to the inner circles of the Royal family 🙂 In my view when an intellectual spends more time showing-off than thinking he is probably betraying his talent should he have any.
“Intellectuals” may have talent or not but all have the ability to cheat more easily than others, and when they do their real prestige tends to be only that of those invited to high-class garden-parties and evening festivities 🙂
Intellectuals are not to be mistaken with elites unless they prove by their behavior that in their particular case there is no mistake.
One last word about arts and literature : let us admit that judging what is good and what is bad is not politically correct nor is it legitimate when we think about it. Yet, we cannot defeat our own feelings can we? Perhaps we’d rather say “this piece of modern art appears to me as junk-art but maybe is it not”, even if our true thoughts are less diplomatic 🙂 It’s tough to conciliate fairness and authenticity, sometimes.
@Tom Hawack
You’re absolutely right that most of “modern” crap is pushed by “elites”. I watched video about people who work in modern art and literature businesses in New York. They are 80-90% young very rich women from elite colleges who never had a financial or creative problem in their lives.
But some “modern” problems are spreading beyond the arts. I saw a video last year from students from a few medical colleges in California that they are taught that obesity is not disease or the problem at all. City of San Francisco hired an advisor who said Earth revolves around a Sun, so we have enough movement for physical exercise. Not a joke. So far this was limited to California and Portland, but I expect this nonsense spread farther.
And do not start me on “journalists”. We are still watching most of US news organizations reporting that current protests are “almost” peaceful. But if you check online, you can find dozens of videos from every demonstration where police are pelted by stones, cars are on fire and stores are looted. Local officials, meanwhile, just complain about troops and say that “peaceful” protesters need to let some steam out and everything will be fine. At least in France, your news call riots a riot.
Perhaps “almost peaceful” is a facility to avoid reporting a mixed reality, one where peaceful demonstrators are parasitized by indeed jerks who aim only to destroy the city and the cops, spread vandalism, not to mention discredit the very legitimacy of the peaceful demonstrators : this happens everywhere. Riots are seldom simple in particular within social activism. In the present case of America, the least we can say of its leader-in-chief is that he is definitely not of those who unite their people. You elect a clown and you get a circus: hey, what did we expect?
If the trial is that of journalism no need to remind that it is politically-oriented journalism which is problematic. For us who follow the news, press, radio or TV, I guess the best is to check different sources, compare, try to differentiate what is lie, demagogy from facts and truth. As for journalists themselves who are on the conflict grounds, who risk their lives, get killed for the sake of reporting to the world what the world sees not, I admire them and am most thankful for their commitment. Nothing to do with an American journalist from an excessively conservative news agency who interviews Vladimir Putin with a total lack of an investigator’s attitude, behavior, questions.
Again : let us not mix up everything, generalize and create false accusations for the sake of hating and spitting, hang ’em after a parody of trial like in the Westerns. Before all let us avoid getting informed on social sites which inform of one thing only : the amount of hatred in today’s world, the arrogance of empty brains who improvise themselves specialists of things they know nothing about.