Google’s drive toward AI-generated search results, and replacing links, is rewiring the internet and might hasten the collapse of the 30+-year-old World Wide Web.
Why it matters: Google answering most inquiries in a single machine voice simplifies and dulls online life.
- The shift might reduce Google’s search ad income and deprive future AIs of human data.
Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Google has slowly increased its AI-generated results. This week, it said it was bringing out “AI Overviews” to all U.S. users.
- Generative AI will answer most searches with a paragraph or two on the world’s most popular search engine.
- This system uses web-based information, but viewers don’t feed its authors.
Publishers and merchants fear this will decrease referral traffic and ruin their companies.
- Google’s change might cause considerably more damage.
Google’s summary replies may also make it harder for people to add to the web’s knowledge pool, which might make its own and others’ AI tools less accurate, timely, and entertaining.
An example: VP Rose Yao demonstrated Google Lens’ capacity to understand live smartphone footage at Google’s I/O event Tuesday.
She pointed her phone at a broken turntable and stated she didn’t know what was wrong or how to fix it.
Long things kept falling off records instead of playing them. She didn’t know its name, so how could she compose a search query?
Google’s AI classified it as a tonearm. It gave her the turntable’s manufacture and model and instructions for fixing it.
It’s cool and probably more efficient than searching for solutions a decade ago.
Back then, you had to read a few online pages or ask your query on an enthusiast forum or blog.
You would get a flood of irritable but educated responses, with a hint of condescension but lots of personality.
Most replies had human faces and voices in that reality.
Why would people contribute their knowledge if their postings aren’t seen by information searchers and only fed to AI?
Millions of individuals have spent decades adding knowledge, stories, and images to the web.
That approach is the only way today’s AI knows anything.
These folks donated to improve their reputations, help others, or meet like-minded people.
Money has always been important. Wikipedia, Reddit, and the leftovers of the 2000s blogosphere were developed without economic incentives, yet they feed today’s AI data.
If Google answers most of the world’s inquiries with one AI voice, there’s less motivation to share knowledge and innovation online.
The opposite side: Google’s AI puts citations and traditional search results underneath AI summaries on the results page.
Google claims that lots of online traffic will continue to function as usual.
Context: Before Google developed AI summaries, social media sites slowly dismantled the free web.
Facebook, Twitter, and its counterparts channeled much of the web’s vitality into private retail talks.
Reality check: The web is withering, not collapsing, through a “managed decline,” as Casey Newton phrased it in Platformer.
The final line: If Google doesn’t control that decline, AI might consume the web and its food.
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