AI eats the web

• The change also threatens to cut into Google's revenue from search ads, and starve future AIs of the human data they'll need.

Driving the news: Google has steadily ramped up its AI-generated results since ChatGPT came on the scene in late 2022, and this week it announced it was rolling out "AI Overviews" to everyone in the U.S.

• That means the world's most popular search engine will answer many or most queries with a paragraph or two written by generative AI.
• This system still relies on web-based information, but it doesn't nourish the creators of that information with users' visits.

Friction point: Publishers and retailers are terrified that this will cut deep into their referral traffic and decimate their businesses.

But there's even deeper damage likely to be wreaked by Google's shift.

• By making it even less inviting for humans to contribute to the web's collective pool of knowledge, Google's summary answers could also leave its own and everyone else's AI tools with less accurate, less timely, and less interesting information.

Case in point: At Google's I/O event Tuesday, VP Rose Yao showed off Google Lens' ability to interpret images from live smartphone video.

• She pointed her phone at a busted turntable and said she didn't know what was wrong or even how to begin fixing it.
• The long thing kept sliding off the records instead of playing them. But she didn't know its name, so how could she even begin to write a search query?
• Google's AI told her it was called a tone arm. It identified the turntable's make and model, and instructed her how to fix it.

That's certainly cool, and it's arguably more efficient than how you might have sought answers a decade ago.

• Back then, you'd have to read a few web pages yourself, or maybe you'd go to some enthusiasts' forum or blog to ask your question.
• You'd receive a welter of cantankerous but knowledgeable replies — veined with a little condescension, maybe, but also plenty of personality.

In that world, most answers you found came with a human face and voice.

• It's hard to see why people would bother contributing their expertise if their posts don't get visited by seekers of information and instead just become fodder for AI to regurgitate.

Today's web exists because millions of people have spent decades extending it with bits of knowledge, lore and images.

• That process is the only reason today's AI is able to know anything about anything.

These humans contributed with a variety of goals: to burnish their reputations and win status, to help others out, or to meet like-minded people.

• Money has always been a big factor, too. But key feeders of the data pool shaping today's AI — like Wikipedia, Reddit and the remnants of the old blogosphere of the 2000s — were built without much of a profit incentive.
• If Google answers most of the world's questions using a single AI voice, there's that much less incentive for anyone to share their expertise and creativity on the web.

The other side: Google's AI offers citations and traditional search results, which will be shoved lower down on the results page below the AI summaries.

• That means plenty of web traffic will continue to work the way it always has, the search giant argues.

Context: Social media platforms started the slow dismantlement of the open web long before Google started doing AI summaries.

• Facebook, Twitter and their competitors diverted much of the energy that built the web into conversations that were taking place in giant, privately owned malls rather than public space.

Reality check: These transformations are taking place over years, not days — the web is withering, not collapsing, through a sort of "managed decline," as Casey Newton put it in Platformer.

The bottom line: If Google doesn't manage that decline with care, AI could end up not only eating the web but swallowing its own sustenance.

• "In a world where everyone gets answers and doesn't have to click on links, the biggest loser is Google," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Axios Tuesday at BFD San Francisco.