You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions..
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
> It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site.
Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links.
Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results.
Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now.
So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?
I don't know that the influx of AI spam would necessarily result in people disengaging and choosing to seek out real content, though. Social media feeds have been serving up less and less content from our actual real life contacts for a while now (partly because people seem to be posting less). As long as it's engaging I think a significant chunk of people aren't going to care whether it's AI
(anecdotally, my mother loves AI generated videos, perhaps it's just novelty at the moment and it will wear off)
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.