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This changes everything?

AI is changing the way we access and use information.

Now, instead of using Google to find relevant websites and then trawl through their pages for the information we need, your favourite AI system will effectively give you all that information with a simple query.

This has the potential to create huge changes in the way the internet works, not only for information consumers but also for those who publish that information in the first place.

For decades, SEO (search engine optimisation) has been a big thing. There are many companies whose sole raison d'etre is to ensure that your website is ranked highly in the results produced by the likes of Google, Bing or whatever. Careful keyword optimisation, playing to the algorithms and the creation of links to those sites all contribute to making sure that when someone searches for a product, service or information, *your* website is on that invaluable first page of results.

Well pretty soon, that won't matter a jot. People won't be doing conventional web searches so, even if you're "right up there", it won't make the slightest difference.

Even more worrying is the fact that most websites will see a worrying drop in traffic created by actual people. Instead, the occasional visit from the back-end of an AI chatbot may be all you can expect.

Although the paradigm change associated with AI will have huge effect on data-consumers, the effect on data publishers may be even greater and vastly more devastating.

News publishers can forget all about the allegedly detrimental effect that Google News and Facebook are having on their profitability. That's going to be peanuts compared to the AI chatbot problem.

Now, intead of following links from Google News or a Facebook feed to the news stories published by your favourite news website, an AI Chatbot will be able to respond with its own aggregated news stories that are not just the utterings of a single publisher but an amalgum of may different reports. The AI will assimilate all these stories and then provide you with what may be the most comprehensive and balanced version of events in the most concise form possible.

For anyone who is interested in saving time and effort, a simple query such as:

could elicit a personalised, customised, concise and highly relevant summary of events -- based on your own personal interests, concerns, preferences and maybe some other specified parameters.

Your chosen AI chatbot will, over time, be able to build a very comprehensive and accurate understanding of what interests you, what is important to you and what may be relevant. This profile goes far beyond the crude profiling currently being done by the likes of Google, Facebook et al and, because of this, the answers to your queries will be spookily good.

So where does this leave the publishers of news and information?

Well as we've seen already, these sites simply become the providers of the raw materials that AI turns into a finished product for the consumer. Unfortunately for those providers, I see no revenue streams coming from AI systems.

Even worse, whereas the current systems link to the original stories on the publisher's websites and thereby drive traffic to those sites to generate ad-revenues, the AI systems do no such thing. In fact, they seldom even provide attribution for the sources of the information they're using to create responses for consumers.

This is going to cause huge problems pretty quickly because the commercial viability of news and other information websites will crumble and be destroyed almost overnight.

Huge ethical, legal and moral challenges will appear to this "data harvesting" and I expect to see many court cases being waged to establish the boundaries for what's acceptable and what's not.

I would not be surprised if regulators force Chatbot AI systems to include a list of links to the webpages from whence all their data has been acquired, even though those links will likely be ignored by consumers. This may slow the destruction of the web as we know it but it won't prevent it.

However, this does create a paradox. How will the AI systems get the data they need to accurately answer queries if their very existance effectively destroys the source of that data?

This, and many other questions will eventually have to be answered.

This AI thing is already becoming a complex beast with unintended consequences that go far beyond the obvious.

What do you think? To the forums with you!

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