No Clicks, No Content: the Unsustainable Future of AI Search

AI is an entropy machine. It sucks out all momentum and stagnates/ossifies everything it touches.

Who cares about them, it will starve society

Who will pay for a subscription fee for journalism if people get trained to receive their information from an opaque tl;dr machine rather than primary sources?

Yes but it also means journalism will be reduced to a few voices who can grow their subscription base large enough to survive. That is not a good thing.

It's a business with odd scaling.

You can find examples of national papers of record having successful subscription models for text content. If you're only subscribing to one paper, it'll be one of those. And you can find 1-5 person outfits with strong personal brands (often built in other media) and a loyal following, who specially want a given person's take on things and want to read everything they write. Basically financials that resemble the "1000 true fans" model.

But between those extremes it is a lot harder to make subscriptions work.

Yes. And as someone who wants to see the ad model of funding gone, I think this is great. Force them to figure out a business model that doesn’t rely on harvesting my data and using it to feed me propaganda.

The large outlets seem to be making subscriptions work, though it does seem to be challenging for them. Ironically, the NYT is constantly running ads in The Daily podcast to subscribe to the NYT to support their journalism. It seems the smaller publishers really struggle to make subscriptions work.

I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free.

Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from).

There's always quality stuff and crap, no matter whether it's been produced for free or not.

> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.

I cannot believe you people. The only difference between the status quo and the future is that the promotional messaging will be seamlessly and undisclosedly delivered with the conversational output. Ads are not going anywhere.

We can be forgiven for not seeing how social media was going to become weaponized against us, how streaming's promise of no ads was only temporary. There's no excuse for not seeing it coming this time.

Is this is a joke? Of course it's not going to kill ad-funded anything, ads will still be there 100% in some form, except now all the ad money will go to 1-2 companies instead of the whole world of web publishers. Very smart cheering that on!

> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers

The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads.

So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.

Sadly, i think the future is more crap. It is simply too easy to generate text you think people might want to read (even if it is not).

On the one hand, I agree with what you've said.

On the other, I think it's unlikely the fun old geocities era comes back.

We'll probably get stuff that looks like it, but it's hawking nationalist revisionist propaganda instead of occult shapeshifting magic lifted from Sabine Baring-Gould, and a thousand Temple OS-inspired clones instead of python.

AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff.

People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation.

And more importantly, people won't be finding and joining communities that produce the websites like stack overflow.

It was nice while it lasted, but likely it will be something that existed only for one generation.

Another commonly ignored group are those that publish information because they want others to know about that information. Even in a worst-case situation where websites are only crawled by bots and get no human visitors at all anymore, government and company websites won't disappear. Any tourist board worth their salt will increase the amount of content they publish compared to current levels. The local conspiracy nut will have an incentive to continue their blog, as will any university researcher. Press releases about new scientific discoveries will continue. Your personal blog might die, but lots of current "linkedin influencers" will start blogs to ensure LLMs think positively about their skills.

And that's assuming a world where people only ask LLMs and don't care about the provenance or trustworthiness of information at all. Which seems unlikely, even conspiracy nuts have some sources they trust more than others. The web will be fine. It will change drastically with the death of click-based advertising, but I don't see a future where it disappears

People create content for free but not to be sucked into some machine that funds a $T company who mixes it up and spits it out without attribution. You want to share info for the sake of it but you also care deeply about how it’s presented and would like people to come read it on your site. So all that volunteer stuff will be killed along with all the recipe sites because those people aren’t going to put in the time and effort without some financial return (the pages of ads we detest but put up with).

In the short term it will feel liberating; in the long term it will kill the web.

But AI is also going to kill some of your positive examples. Stack Overflow for example is in a steep decline, only a small fraction of questions are posted today compared to the peak. And the effects are more than financial, so even non-profit examples like forums would be hit.

If new people don't discover your site with useful user-created content, they won't contribute to it. You're also cutting off the pipeline for recruiting new users to your forum or Q&A site.

The recipe thing is because recipes are not copyrightable and many duplicates exist around the internet. The padded length makes the content unique / not penalized as a duplicate and as a secondary benefit avoids penalties for short content.

Not saying this is good, but it’s the reason behind it.

> the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun

LLMs are making many of the enthusiasts who were online just "for fun" feel sick for contributing to their training set.

> someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before

I haven't seen a recipe page without a "Jump to Recipe" page button in forever.

Often, that off-topic content was garbage anyway. Not really deep or helpful or expert in any way. Not always, but often.

I suppose wanting to kill the commercial web is a valid position, although it feels more like grumpy old man yells at kids to get off his lawn than a considered analysis of relative value and impact, but even then I think you're underestimating the impact the AI problem will have on the non-commercial web as well.

Lots of people might be willing to run websites for fun or personal satisfaction or whatever, but how many people will continue to be willing to do so when they don't actually get to present the content to visitors and it's instead just regurgitated by AI? Half the fun of hosting your own website is personalizing it and choosing how to share the content. Even people blogging for fun put a lot of thought into their posts on how to phrase an argument or tell a story. But what's the point when nobody will ever see your actual post, just your thoughts rearranged and presented by AI? Maybe some people only care about the information being out there in any form, but I'd be willing to bet that's yet a smaller subset of even the people who would contribute in a return to geocities version of the web.

Bottom line, you will always get content, whatever that may mean.

But great content creators will want to be rewarded one way or another. Book writers get paid, movie makers as well, so why shouldn't those who share their wisdom in a blog post? If someone is making money off your content and you aren't, you will not be happy. When it's not even attributed to you, it's even worse.

SEO is a response to Google's incentives, and Google can fix it if it wants.

at this point, i've built a massive platform for ten years and watching the seoers die might be worth it losing it all for. it'll at least kill off all the indians that have been scamming in my niche for three and half years with impunity

The same amount of quality content might still exist even when the advantages to providing it dry up further.... But good luck finding in an ever growing sea of slop.

We might see a resurgence in curated content but I have my worries. Google gets worse and worse but also traditional curated sites have started simply repost what's trending on Twitter.

You'll still see it, but in laundered form, indistinguishable from non-placed content. We just won't be able to block it, because its origin will be hidden in the system.

I think I'm going to miss the world where I could more easily trace the provenance of information.

Not if they can’t afford to pay the bills.

A fuzzy search engine with a better "semantic index"[1] than classic search engines, but the trade-off is that instead of returning links it returns a generated soup of words that are semantically close to your "query".

Mostly useful when you're only looking for the presence of words or terms in the output (including the presence of related words), rather than a coherent explanation with the quality of human-written text.

Sometimes the response is accidentally a truthful statement if interpreted as human text. The quality of a model is judged by how well-tuned they are for increasing the rate these accidents (for the lack of a better word).

[1]: EDIT: In the sense of "semantic web"; not in the sense of "actually understanding meaning" or any type of psychological sense.

Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.

I assume that AI chat is a lot of questions being asked by people unfamiliar with the subject matter. Would that training dataset have any information from experts?

Where will the experience come from?

So they will learn on the hallucinations they told to people? Sounds like a sound system.

Eh, I block every ad I can and use AI. That said most of my AI searches are ones that are in depth and use thinking models.

With that said there are some queries AI does better than search engines. If I have something I'm trying to remember from the distant past with poorly refined definitions I can iterate to a solution much better than reading spam filled sites.

Whenever I have to use someone else's computer, or stand up a new one myself, I am reminded of this reality.

If LLMs ruin the economic viability of corporate blogspam, that's a net positive for society in my eyes. One of the few net positives we can expect from the AI bubble, as far as I can tell.

Of course, the new problem is that we have a bunch of LLMs trained on corporate blogspam, producing low-quality information that only feels plausible because of its correct grammar and neutral voice.

Sadly, uBlock Origin doesn't block my Kagi/Google search results which are 50% AI-generated spam.

The early era of the web was an exclusive club for well-paid computer engineers and other computer specialists with a lot of spare time. Which was reflected in information being heavily focused on certain topics and perspectives heavily tilted to certain types of people with a narrow band of ideologies and beliefs. Just like Hacker News is today.

I prefer a million times today's web, which serves everybody and where I can find all kind of thoughts and ideas, without restriction. You just need to make an effort to find it. I prefer a million times a well stocked supermarket with all the ingredients I need to make anything I want, rather than a restaurant which serves only one meal made perfectly.

Social interactions are subject to network wffects and have all but captured by social media companies. This part of the web is dead and won't come back.

I've written a 125,000-word book a year before GPT-3 was a thing.

If this book came out today, in 2025, how would you know that the 420 pages are actually worth your time and not just a bunch of hallucinated LLM slop?

I've been wondering whether Wikipedia and libraries in 2030 will be in a better overall place quality-wise, or will just be overrun.

The last few times I looked for information on YouTube (by typing a keyword phrase or question instead of looking up a specific channel/creator), most of the top results were AI-narrated presentations. Some of those were filled with comments of people correcting obvious mistakes in the content (which as a layperson I would not have seen as mistakes)

books will be around for a while.

but i wouldn't mind getting back to the internet of the 80/90s where you could easily find more genuine content and less aggregators, replicators, marketeers and clickfarms. if that's "killing the internet" then it couldn't happen soon enough (i guess marketeers will not go away no matter what, that's a given).

the fear of decline of original content doesn't seem serious. much of what there is now is endless regurgitation anyway. while most of the free stuff nowadays is indeed just noise, the most valuable, original and quality stuff is free, has always been, and it's there. people have been contributing interesting stuff for multiple reasons and in multiple ways for decades, and still do; it is just buried under tons of rubbish. i see no reason why they would stop. if anything, a less noisy internet could be an incentive, and if gaps in knowledge form that will be even more reason to share and contribute, and things like stackoverflow will come back once llms become obsolete enough.

Human curated high quality information on google is getting rare, its as simple as that.

There is a renaissance of extremely high quality YouTube videos from creators with very few subscribers. Particularly in Math and Science content.

But the general web is full of a lot really bad websites that effectively just waste people's time.

Have you heard the economic maxim that bad forces out good? Because that basically already happened to high quality human curated content. Just look at reviews. The good ones are buried under floods of crap. Professional reviewers (in the qualtity sense) were already displaced long before the plague of sponsored influencers.

Most of the high quality human content has already been drowned out by the low quality human content for clicks. AI does the filtering process for me now. I'm using AI because greedy humans already made it bad and it's a really good tool to have in the current environment

Oh god, this has just made me reflect that we're in the golden age of generative AI - not in technology terms, in user experience terms. We're in the period where the major products are competing against each other before they switch into enshitfication mode. You're certainly right, there's going to be ads in the answers and probably worse. I'm imagining companies paying to introduce ideas as subtle subtexts to millions of unrelated answers or platforms deliberately engineering the ux to maximise understanding of our drives and preferences purely so it can be sold.

I had lunch with an entrepreneur with a "big idea" to convince major LLM platforms to feature ads in their answers, using businesses that they specify.

It was a very short lunch.

It's just a new era in the ad-block wars where my ad-block LLM tries to excise the ads from their ad-generating LLM.