this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? (www.economist.com)
submitted 1 week ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/tech@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

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.