Casey Newton writing on Platformer: Google Slings More AI at the Web

To get the web we had at its peak, platforms and publishers had to align around mutually beneficial incentives. They did it before, and they can do it again. It would nice to see some progress here before the web breaks any further than it already has.

This really is the big question, and Casey brings up one idea that I think is quite interesting related to letting you connect your premium website subscriptions into chatbots so you can get better answers based on the sources you personally pay for. I don’t think there’s a single magic bullet that will make the future of the web great for everyone, but the current state of things has been developed over decades and is basically unrecognizable to someone who teleported here from the 90s.

If I could be real for a second, I’ve found my corner of the internet to be frustratingly quick to pretend all of this LLM stuff is doing nothing of value, or to just throw their hands in the air and exclaim, “it’s all over!” I think too many people feel these tools are just like NFTs, and they’ll have 6 months of heat before crashing down – a tough position to take 2.5 years after the launch of ChatGPT. I’m not saying you need to love them or even use them yourself, and I’m certainly not saying that you need to use them or be left behind (a common NFT/crypto tactic), but I think sticking your head in the sand and wishing the rest of the world stops using them is an increasingly perilous position to take.

I guess my message is that it’s time to engage. The internet blew up a lot of ways the world used to work and it destroyed the value of many things that used to be a part of our daily lives. That disruption was met by creative thinkers who found new business models and new ways to bring value to people with the new tools available to them. If you think that LLMs are going to destroy search engines and referral traffic, then help brainstorm solutions to this problem or work towards building a human-centric internet that people want to visit and can’t be replaced by bots. To get a little meta for a second, this is a personal blog that I’ll have been writing for 15 years this fall, and if you’re subscribed, there’s a good chance that you’re not here for the raw news or tips and tricks on using your computer better (I have a YouTube channel for that 😉), you’re here for the person behind the keyboard. That’s the human internet, and I think it still has a strong future if we keep at it. I think that future is more at risk if too many people choose not to engage and just hope this all goes away.