AI Is Killing the Internet

[SactoDoug]

I had a brief conversation with a webmaster for a site that I visit. He told me that since AI was added to search engines, especially Google, visits to his site has dropped off a cliff. Well over 80% of his site traffic is gone.

I don't use Google for most of my searches but I know that most people do use Google. I gave it a try and sure enough, the AI answer for searches is the top result on all searches. I was surprised that most of the time the AI answer is correct. I understand why site visits are down now. Pre-AI integration a person would enter search terms in a search engine then would have to visit the resulting links to find the answer. When the AI just gives you the answer right away, there is no longer a reason to visit the sites.

This has some deep implications. The first and immediate one is that a large number of sites are going to go off line in the near future. Reduced site visits directly translates to reduced revenue generation from advertisements.

I believe there is also a large ethical questions here, especially for Google. Google have both the most used search engine and the largest advertisement network on the Internet. Google trained its AI by scraping sites on the Internet. That is how Google's AI can provide answers quickly and accurately. By placing the AI answers at the top of the search results, Google is suppressing site visits and reducing how much it pays out in ad revenue to the same sites that it scraped to train its AI.

I have seen news stories of intellectual property owners suing AI companies for using their IP to train the AI. This recent realization of what is happening across the Internet has convinced me that these AI companies do owe IP owners payment for the training using other people's IP. Additionally, I believe that these search engines that use AI owe the sites that they scraped payment each time an AI answer is given based on the scraped data.

[Big Chudungus]

overall I'm quite pleased with Google AI answers. much better most of the time than sloughing through websites looking for answers. And this is really AI 0.8, not even 1.0 imo.

I'm still bullish on AI overall, its just that US based AI is mostly Govt funded Big Brother spying, and is crippled by Political Correctness at every turn. IMO its also missing out on some great everyday consumer level Killer Apps, and I can think of a few off top of my head where AI could and should completely destroy several entire "industries".

1)RE Agents/Brokers including the entire RE Loan biz. All houses on Zillow should be listed with something similar to Google Maps, not some brain dead RE Agent taking a few snaps to "stage" the house. Have a "kid" with a gadget walk through the property lines, exterior, then interior along every wall including inside closets, inside cabinets, up in attic and crawlspace with extendable selfie stick. AI would then digest this and spit out a wealth of very useful data buyers could use to make better decisions. Instead of RE Agents adding no value for taking 6%, coming and going, this would be funded by a few ads on Zillow from local contractors, motels, etc and maybe an extra 10% of real value would be created out of thin air in savings of value time and finding that perfect house with no surprises. Sellers would be welcome to include Corrections Notes if AI gets something wrong, but the original AI Report would remain. Likewise, would spit out which lenders will loan on the property given its condition and best rates for your income/rating, etc. Oh yeah, and AI would also spit out useful info on "the neighborhood" that no RE Agent will give you even if she knows damn well.

2)Ford CEO said he can't find guys to take $120K jobs. (he is lying, dealerships screw techs on impossible to meet Shop Time) Thats because it takes 5yrs training to pull a 2025 truck motor. I was pulling motors out of 1960s cars and trucks with "common sense" when I was 18yrs old (even if I had my more exp buddy do the actual lift with his engine hoist). It wouldn't be hard, since everything is also in CAD, to include nice AI enhanced animations of exactly how to do the most complex mechanical tasks, step by step so even someone who can't read is perfectly capable. Include stuff like force vectors with force, direction, rotation, etc. AFAIK, the first time an engine is pulled out of a 2025 Ford is at some lucky dealership in New Mexico or somewhere. They don't do "Factory Teardowns" exercises. Motorcycle magazines at least used to do full teardowns of new models in their reviews including engine disassembly.

[ibanezfoo]

AI searches, in general, are the Google we wanted in the first place. Most people I know just use ChatGPT to search for things now. Google AI, for me anyway, is not always great. Grok just plain sucks *** and Elon should be embarassed by it.

[EM2]

You guys missed the OP's point, that Google and other AI are using website IP (Intellectual Property for those of you in Rio Linda) without paying for the information.
In doing so, AI is going to kill the very entities upon which it relies for the information it gathers.

We are not discussing how effective AI can be at providing information, but rather how it provides that information, from the backs of legitimate content providers.

[TrappedinCalifornia]

Site traffic seems to come and go in regular or semi-regular waves and the reasons vary. Periodically, we hear about and see various websites and/or webpages simply not generating enough traffic and going down. In fact, if you go back, we see discussions on this site about gun sites (among others) being 'throttled' by Google and other search engines. I've been seeing similar discussions for a couple of years on YouTube by content providers and I've heard discourse that YouTube changes the rules periodically which negatively impacts various providers for no apparent reason. That's without taking into account the various accounts YouTube is deliberately trying to dismantle, such as the gun channels.

Whether AI is going 'kill the Internet' or if it's simply the latest version of what's been historically going on, the reality is it all comes down to profit motives. Someone or some company sees the potential for profit, takes advantage of it, and BOOM, people start crying foul, predicting doom.

Trump has a plan with regard to AI. It's drawing criticism in the media, in state legislatures, and on Capital Hill. It's another one of those times when technology is moving faster than politicians can react and that worries many.

Remember, the Internet has always been about information and making it available to the masses. It's something which goes back to before Martin Luther nailed his protest to the door in that the Catholic Church had been keeping the Bible from the common people. It's something which Christ himself protested against in relation to the religious teachers and institutions at the time. The bottom line is that, from that perspective, this is simply the latest incarnation and it's something which is chronically with society in that we see it regularly in books and movies.

[ibanezfoo]

You guys missed the OP's point, that Google and other AI are using website IP (Intellectual Property for those of you in Rio Linda) without paying for the information.
In doing so, AI is going to kill the very entities upon which it relies for the information it gathers.

We are not discussing how effective AI can be at providing information, but rather how it provides that information, from the backs of legitimate content providers.

Right. Suno, all the image generation sites, etc are all using stolen information to generate their product. If the information is publicly availible, or people don't read the 8723984764 page TOS, well, too bad. M$ and friends really want you to back up your data to their cloud so they can rummage through your data and feed their language models. Flip side: premium market for guranteed human made products.

[The Gleam]

You guys missed the OP's point, that Google and other AI are using website IP (Intellectual Property for those of you in Rio Linda) without paying for the information.
In doing so, AI is going to kill the very entities upon which it relies for the information it gathers.

We are not discussing how effective AI can be at providing information, but rather how it provides that information, from the backs of legitimate content providers.

Now just think about how you can expect Google to monetize that interface view of their abbreviated and scraped result by installing advertising in the headers, footers, banners, and margins. Then add to those ads, they were scraping what you were searching for by your IP, cookies, previously entered info and kick you as a positive hit back to the advertisers with information about you and your searches.

Creepsville.

Probably why Berkshire Hathaway loaded up on billions of Google stock recently, never having a prior interest in the past, but is simultaneously dumping Apple in equal amounts.

---

[Nihonto Chicken]

I'm not a computer nerd, but found this ZH article interesting on the technical side re Google vs. Nvidia. Cannot vouch for the validity of the arguments, but it implies that Google is winning the AI war on speed and power consumption despite Nvidia's dominance of its CUDA operating system. FWIW.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/chip-made-ai-inference-era-google-tpu

Topics covered:

• The history of the TPU and why it all even started?
• The difference between a TPU and a GPU?
• Performance numbers TPU vs GPU?
• Where are the problems for the wider adoption of TPUs
• Google’s TPU is the biggest competitive advantage of its cloud business for the next 10 years
• How many TPUs does Google produce today, and how big can that get?
• Gemini 3 and the aftermath of Gemini 3 on the whole chip industry

[arrix]

Dead Internet theory is real. Over 60% of all Internet traffic is AI bots. Imagine the energy savings of all those bots were shut off.

[ibanezfoo]

Dead Internet theory is real. Over 60% of all Internet traffic is AI bots. Imagine the energy savings of all those bots were shut off.

Oh its only going to get worse. My company builds most of the data centers in this country. Yall aint see nothing yet....

The cooling systems alone are big enough to drive a truck though. I know this because we thought it was funny to actually drive a truck through one....

[socal m1 shooter]

Well... as the dust settles, it seems the Internet isn't the only thing that will be changed as a result of AI. A Korean economist was interviewed by an Indian publication and he predicts that AI will take a lot of jobs from India. Other countries as well, including the Philippines, face a similar problem.

Korea, ravaged by a shooting war not 75 years ago, and with no real natural resources to speak of, went from being third- to first-world in the span of 50 or 60 years, largely because of the people, the culture and the work ethic. Many other countries, richer in natural resources, and not ravaged by war, have wanted to pull off a similar feat, India for example. As the linked article observes, back in the 1960s India and Korea were at similar GDP levels: India at U$D 88 per capita, and Korea at U$D 94 per capita (1961). In 2024, India was estimated at U$D 2700 per capita, and Korea at just about U$D 36,100 per capita. The Philippines was ahead of them, U$D 176 per capita in 1961; now it is closer to India than Korea.

In Korean-language publications he and others have compared Korea, India, Brazil, and other countries. "We could implement the same policies Japan did because our culture was close enough to Japan’s. India trying to copy Korea directly is like Brazil trying to copy Korea — the cultural operating system rejects the software."

As this AI economy takes shape, many changes. It is a great time to be retired or nearing retirement.

[EM2]

Well... as the dust settles, it seems the Internet isn't the only thing that will be changed as a result of AI. A Korean economist was interviewed by an Indian publication and he predicts that AI will take a lot of jobs from India. Other countries as well, including the Philippines, face a similar problem.

Korea, ravaged by a shooting war not 75 years ago, and with no real natural resources to speak of, went from being third- to first-world in the span of 50 or 60 years, largely because of the people, the culture and the work ethic. Many other countries, richer in natural resources, and not ravaged by war, have wanted to pull off a similar feat, India for example. As the linked article observes, back in the 1960s India and Korea were at similar GDP levels: India at U$D 88 per capita, and Korea at U$D 94 per capita (1961). In 2024, India was estimated at U$D 2700 per capita, and Korea at just about U$D 36,100 per capita. The Philippines was ahead of them, U$D 176 per capita in 1961; now it is closer to India than Korea.

In Korean-language publications he and others have compared Korea, India, Brazil, and other countries. "We could implement the same policies Japan did because our culture was close enough to Japan’s. India trying to copy Korea directly is like Brazil trying to copy Korea — the cultural operating system rejects the software."

As this AI economy takes shape, many changes. It is a great time to be retired or nearing retirement.

Or work in a skilled trade (hands on).
Until AI really takes off, and robotics catches up with AI, hands on skilled trades will be needed.

[ibanezfoo]

Or work in a skilled trade (hands on).
Until AI really takes off, and robotics catches up with AI, hands on skilled trades will be needed.

Yeah, about that..... lol

We just bought a few robot welders. They can weld 400" a day vs a human that can only do 30-100". The thing about that is we had to hire some less skilled welders to do the fitting and tacking to feed the robots. When we bought cutting robots a few years ago we had to hire a couple more people to feed that as well. The AI welds are lightyears beyond the quality of what a human welder can do. The AI watches the welds in real time with 32 sensors and adjusts as it goes so the welds are damn near perfect. The crap thing about that though is these robots are new and my company is helping the manufacturer train the AI on our processes. Which means the skilled welders are the ones driving the robots that will replace a portion of their job. The robots are only used for the repetative crappy work though. All the specialty or hard to reach type welding still has to be done by a skilled welder.

[Reno-Kid]

You guys missed the OP's point, that Google and other AI are using website IP (Intellectual Property for those of you in Rio Linda) without paying for the information.
In doing so, AI is going to kill the very entities upon which it relies for the information it gathers.

We are not discussing how effective AI can be at providing information, but rather how it provides that information, from the backs of legitimate content providers.

Some who can design and program a Anti-AI paywall would reap alot$$$$
No Pay, No AI.... may well burst the AI bubble.

[jarhead714]

Artificial intelligence is killing truth, especially to those recently and yet to be born.