Somehow makes me think of the times before modern food safety regulations, when adulterations with substances such as formaldehyde or arsenic were common, apparently: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7323515/ We may be in a similar age regarding information now. Of course, this has always been a problem with the internet, but I would argue that AI (and the way oligopolistic companies are shoving it into everything) is making it infinitely worse.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I've already predicted that scraper activity would crash due to AI in my most recent MoreWrite essay, and seeing this only makes me confident in that assessment.
On a wider front, I suspect that web search in general's gonna dive in popularity - even if scraper activity remains the same during the AI winter, the bubble (with plenty of help from Google) has completely broken the web ecosystem which allowed search engines (near-exclusively Google) to thrive, through triggering a slop-nami that drowned human-made art, supercharging SEO's ability to bury quality output, and enabling AI Summary™ services which steal traffic through stealing work.
I guess the question here really boils down to: Can (less-than-perfect) capitalism solve this problem somehow (by allowing better solutions to prevail), or is it bound to fail due to the now-insurmountable market power of existing players?
I think the hardest part is the sheer volume of content to sift through and index on today's Internet. It is a completely different, and MUCH larger, beast than when Google was made in a garage in 1998 and quickly took the world by storm.
I have confidence that an open source/crowd sourced effort could beat Googles results, but the computational power and backend are I think the biggest gating factor. It would also need to be completely distributed with a lot of duplicate data for fault tolerance, but also a way to have a "source of truth" so that malicious users couldn't rewrite/poison data.