Last week, Google showed off its upcoming news, and what drew the most attention and consternation was that Google was planning to go all in on AI search. When you google something, you will get a summary of what you are looking for that is so complete that you never have to click through to the sources. Disaster for us who are responsible for, you know, the information that Google uses. No readers = no revenue.
My first thought was therefore a column on the theme “Do you like the Internet? Change your search engine”. It’s still a relevant message, you can actually opt out of AI, it’s easier than ever to change the default search engine on your mobile or browser. But it didn’t feel like a very original message. Hacking Google is also a bit unfair, it’s the users who started asking ChatGPT instead of Google, and Google has to adapt or die.
The Internet is always changing
Last week, Google showed off its upcoming news, and what drew the most attention and consternation was that Google was planning to go all in on AI search. When you google something, you will get a summary of what you are looking for that is so complete that you never have to click through to the sources. Disaster for us who are responsible for, you know, the information that Google uses. No readers = no revenue.
My first thought was therefore a column on the theme “Do you like the Internet? Change your search engine”. It’s still a relevant message, you can actually opt out of AI, it’s easier than ever to change the default search engine on your mobile or browser. But it didn’t feel like a very original message. Hacking Google is also a bit unfair, it’s the users who started asking ChatGPT instead of Google, and Google has to adapt or die.
The Internet is always changing
So I thought instead to speculate on how the Internet might look in ten years, if current trends continue. It will be a radically different Internet, but it’s easy to forget that we had a radically different Internet 10-15 years ago, too. Back then, our social media feed consisted mainly of our friends’ activities, now we’re fed targeted content from people we don’t know, curated by algorithms. The social activity takes place instead in closed groups. If we go back another ten years, we read text on people’s blogs and wrote in discussion forums.
For the sake of this prediction, I’m going to make the assumption that one solves generative AI’s most glaring error. That it is wrong. Alarming often and often alarming errors. You will get unequivocal answers that are up to the wall even in basic facts. Generative AI today is like the colleague who is fast but terribly sloppy, so you have to double-check and redo everything he does. It is far from certain that this problem can even be solved, hallucinations and wrong answers are not a bug but a feature of how generative AI works, and they are not easily cleaned up. And what happens when AI starts quoting itself, as is increasingly the case? It is generally easier to see scenarios where Generative AI runs in the ditch than fulfills the vision.
But that said, we assume that Generative AI will actually solve the task of delivering accurate information packaged in the way you need it.
Radical structural transformation
It will lead to a huge structural change. Today’s model of the Internet with web pages that are ad-supported with ads and readers largely delivered to the web pages by Google will basically cease to work, leaving behind fewer and larger news services with paywalls for daily news from trusted sources.
It won’t change the basic fact that Google needs content to share and that those who create that content will need to be paid. It is not even certain that the change required will cause some sort of mass death of online businesses, free market forces are quick to pick up trends even when it comes to information production.
But much of the content written on websites today to be read by humans will instead be produced primarily to be read by AI, and Google will pay for that information directly, with previous intermediaries. These editors write to make the content as easily accessible to AI as possible and to reduce the risk of misunderstandings. The information may not even be publicly available on the Internet, but a certain AI engine has paid for the exclusive rights to it.
The Internet then largely becomes a platform for AI to retrieve information, while humans primarily interact with AI. Does that sound like a more boring Internet? Maybe, but we humans are good at making things fun, probably in new ways that I hadn’t even thought of.