AI companies are causing a content drought that will eventually starve them.
In a recent article, The Economist didn’t mince words: “AI is killing the web.” Published last month, the piece raises urgent questions about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet as we know it: ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortunately I think the situation is far worse than it seems.
The article focuses mainly on the publishing industry, news and magazine sites that rely primarily on visits to their sites and selling ads. This is hardly new for the publishing industry. Televisions arrived in living rooms in the 60s disrupting print and radio media, in the late 90s and early 2000s the internet further devastated the print business, and social media was stealing attention well before the advent of AI. But it’s not just the publishing industry. There’s a much larger economy being disrupted by generative AI platforms.
For the past 25 years, online businesses have relied on people searching Google for information and clicking through to their sites to get the information. For example, a business that sells dirt bikes might create a comprehensive guide to winterize a cottage. People search for information on winterizing their cottage, click through to the dirt bike company’s guide, and are then exposed to the company’s brand, maybe join their email list, and maybe buy their products or services.
Now that ChatGPT and Google are serving the information up to people, there’s little reason to click through to the site. If you’ve used Google search lately, you’ll have noticed an AI blurb responding to your query before you even see a list of links. The result: less clicks on the links.
So the question follows, if fewer and fewer people are visiting your company site, what’s your incentive to produce and maintain high quality content?
Worse yet, ChatGPT and Google rely on the content produced by businesses to train their AI models. If businesses stop producing content, what happens to the answers provided by ChatGPT and Google?
Could AI companies be this short sighted?
In short: Yes. This is a gold rush mentality. And like any gold rush, there’s little attention paid to the long term. It’s get rich quick and we’ll deal with the consequences later. It’s a race to become the dominant force in AI with no attention paid to the sustainability of their fuel source: the content.
However, Google doesn’t fit this profile. They’ve needed businesses and publishers to produce content all along and they know they still do.
We, the public, have greatly benefited from the symbiotic relationship between businesses and Google. You ask Google for something and it responds with links to the best content. Businesses want those visitors to their sites and so they want to have the best content. Although Google’s results pages have gotten worse for the public and businesses in recent years (half a page of ads at this point), the situation has largely been a win-win-win for them, businesses, and the public.
Businesses produced and maintained quality content, Google rewarded the businesses with visitors while diverting some to their ads, and the public got the information they were searching for. Unfortunately this symbiotic relationship is breaking down. In their effort to stay relevant and compete with ChatGPT, Google is tearing up the contract they’ve had with publishers and businesses for the past 25 years.
Google knows this but they seem to be pretending that they don’t. In fact, it seems that they’re scared and they don’t know what else to do. They have no other option.
One solution here seems to be regulation. To many, it feels like an injustice that AI companies can scrape information from sites, combine it, and serve it up to their users. The bottom line is that if the content didn’t exist to train their models, the AI companies wouldn’t be able to produce an answer.
Unfortunately, lawsuits so far have been going in favor of AI companies. Copyright law doesn’t seem to be a fit here, so perhaps we need new laws. I doubt they’ll come quickly enough though. Google search is rolling out AI Mode right now: no more AI blurb with links underneath. Just a ChatGPT-like interface when you do a Google search. It seems we’re already well into this trap and there doesn’t seem to be an escape.
Then again, there’s definitely an economic bubble here. ChatGPT is not profitable despite billions in revenue. The infrastructure is very expensive to run. Perhaps the bubble will burst, the money will dry up, and it won’t be feasible to employ generative AI for general search. Google and its competitors will use it for other things of course, but not for search. It’s hard to see this happening though. The genie is out of the bottle.