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As predicted

A little while ago I predicted that AI would change the way we use the internet.

That was a pretty safe bet, hardly a difficult piece of insight.

However, reports are now surfacing that this is indeed happening and perhaps far more rapidly than anyone expected.

The most noticeable change has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of traffic being directed to websites that publish the sort of information that has, for years, made up the backbone of the online world.

For decades now, we've been used to typing a query into a search engine, hitting "enter" and being presented with pages of hypertext links that enable us to find the information we're looking for.

Well that process has now changed; dramatically.

If you're a regular user of Google's search engine you will have noticed that now, most seach queries have an "AI Summary" at the top of the results returned.

As predicted, an awful lot of people are simply using this AI summary instead of digging deeper and wandering off, via the hypertext links, to other parts of the web.

The search engine that web publishers have relied on for so long to be one of their primary sources of traffic is now their biggest enemy and actively erecting obstacles to that traffic by way of these summaries.

One of the biggest loosers are news publishers.

This BBC story does a good job of documenting the concerns of those publishers.

Now, at least in the UK, legal moves are afoot to try and have the UK's Competition and Markets Authority reign in Google's activities in this area, so as to protect publishers' revenues.

Of course there other potential issues with these AI summaries.

As we all know, AI is far from perfect and from time to time it has a tendency to "make shirt up" and hallucinate. One can only wonder if there's legal liability for Google in the event that someone acts on bad information presented in one of these AI summaries and by doing so, suffers a finacial (or other) loss.

I'm pretty sure that Google's T&C will say something along the lines of "all care, no responsibility" but even those disclaimers can be challenged in court if the plaintiff had good grounds to believe that the information would be accurate.

As websites themselves are increasingly created by AI systems, the issue of woefully bad information circulating and being used to train AI increases, at an exponential pace. Pretty soon I suspect, the veracity of everything you find online will be up for challenge.

Oh well, the days when the internet was a valuable resource for those seeking knowledge and information were good while they lasted. Welcome to the new age of enshitification.

Carpe Diem folks!

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