I think people haven't fully clocked yet how foundational this shift is for the wider internet.
For decades now, we had a social contract: Google scrapes our websites and surfaces some of our content, we make it easier for them, Google gets people on our websites, and in exchange Google gets content (links) to stuff with ads (plus they get some tracking on top).
This created an ecosystem where people are incentivised to create better websites. You create good content, Google surfaces it, you get eyeballs, and it's a decent deal overall.
Sure, this dynamic is contingent on Google fighting SEO spam, which they seemingly stopped doing lately, but still there was hope that it's temporary. There was hope that if search gets bad enough they'll start bleeding users to competitors and get their stuff together.
Now Google throws the contract out of the window. Whatever you write or record or snap or shoot, they ingest everything (because we have no choice) and feed it into their Moloch, and out goes unattributed, unverifiable, ad-ridden slop. There is no compensation, no recompense.
I think it's even worse than that. I think we'll see a shift in incentives for writing content. If websites are used as the source for AI engines that people rely on, those websites are effectively becoming the source of truth for everything.
Right now I can tell if a website is blog spam SEO garbage, but I'm not sure if that'll be possible once everything is "laundered" into a homogeneous looking result.
I think there's going to be incentive to create huge quantities of "data" because having the highest volume makes you the source of truth for a topic. So, rich companies and people will be buying compute like crazy so they can generate tons of AI spam so another AI surfaces their viewpoint as "fact".
Ugh yeah, I hadn't even realized what a serious vulnerability it will be when large corporations and foreign governments start to flood the web with their preferred "facts". Google and Microsoft will gladly slurp up all of that training data. Modern Google doesn't even bother to exclude blatant spam domains from SERPs, there's no way they are going to combat this problem effectively.
This really is looking more and more like the death of the open web. Curated and closed communities will be the only places left to get authentic information online.
Do the AI features apply to content from sites that block their 'Google-Extended' crawler (which they use to index content for their LLMs)?[1]
I'm not as worried if that distinction still applies – I can just block 'Google-Extended' and let the normal Googlebot through. If not, though, that feels like the beginning of the end of people wanting to be indexed, eventually leading to Google eating itself.
I have felt for about six months that the web as we've known it is dead. The contract you speak of is on its last legs.
The problem is, with GPT style AI I think this was inevitable, Google has just decided to ride the wave rather than falling into obscurity.
Also, google has youtube, which should not be underestimated as a source of information. There is a lot of good, credible information on youtube, with even better signals (sub counts) than the traditional web.
This is Googles ace in the hole so to speak, the web can die, they can still feed their AI's with youtube, who else can?
For decades now, we had a social contract: Google scrapes our websites and surfaces some of our content, we make it easier for them, Google gets people on our websites, and in exchange Google gets content (links) to stuff with ads (plus they get some tracking on top).
This created an ecosystem where people are incentivised to create better websites. You create good content, Google surfaces it, you get eyeballs, and it's a decent deal overall.
Sure, this dynamic is contingent on Google fighting SEO spam, which they seemingly stopped doing lately, but still there was hope that it's temporary. There was hope that if search gets bad enough they'll start bleeding users to competitors and get their stuff together.
Now Google throws the contract out of the window. Whatever you write or record or snap or shoot, they ingest everything (because we have no choice) and feed it into their Moloch, and out goes unattributed, unverifiable, ad-ridden slop. There is no compensation, no recompense.
Google is midjourneying the entire internet.