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Is Google AI About to Destroy the Web? [1]

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Date: 2023-05-11  

I am so, so old

bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But their vision for search has that potential:

To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. “Why is sourdough bread still so popular?” she writes and hits enter. Google’s normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase “Generative AI is experimental.” A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says “corroborates” what’s in the summary. AI is coming to Google search through Search Generative Experience - The Verge

Now, to be clear, this is in some respects merely an extension of what Google does today. It already summarizes information it scrapes from the web and displays it wholesale, removing the need to visit the source. But the ability of AI to more rapidly synthesize more types and amounts of information may accelerate that process to a dangerous for the open web. At some point, a difference of degree can morph into a difference of kind. And we may be looking at the beginning of that point, especially in mobile:

This is the new look of Google’s search results page. It’s AI-first, it’s colorful, and it’s nothing like you’re used to. It’s powered by some of Google’s most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media. In the demos I saw, it’s often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you’ll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results. Ibid. Is that the right in a blog post? Anyway, this is from the same link as the last quote.

Google is pushing the links, the gateway out of their domain, below the summary and sometimes off the screen entirely. True, the summary has some links to reassure you that the information is correct, but why would you click on them if you just want an answer? After all, the answer must be correct, since the links are there to prove that the information came from a reliable source.

Put aside whether or not that is true. While AI lies a significant portion of the time, including making up cites, the default behavior for people is likely going to be to believe these results. After all, they come from Google and have citations. What else could they be but true? Think, then, on what this means. People who produce content rely on search platforms to drive traffic. Without traffic, they cannot monetize their work, either through ads or subscriptions. In the short term, this likely means even fewer resources for news gathering, niche reporting, etc. In the long term, content providers are going to have to fight back somehow. And that could take us to some places we may not want to go.

As I said, in the short term, its likely to drive some news organizations under or reduce their ability to create news at all. Similarly, niche sites and content will have a harder time being seen. Sites that provide travel information, reviews, recommendations, anything that people go to for advice will likely be under severe stress. After all, if all their data can all be summarized by AI, if the question "Where do I go in Paris if one kid hates peanuts?" can be answered in an AI summary from scrapped data, how do those sites stay alive?

And if they cannot stay alive, then how does the next round of AI recommendations get generated? What will be left to scrape? Well, a lot of it will be propaganda, much of it right wing. We already see the phenomenon of allegedly local news being in fact right wing agit prop driven by national organizations. That kind of disinformation is likely to become prevalent, since right wing organizations can afford to fund these websites at a loss and have a demonstrated desire to do so. And given the money already behind forcing all types of institutions to toe the right wing line in the so-called culture wars, it is easy to see an AI summary about the best liberal arts school regurgitating right wing myths about those schools, or recommending a conservative alternative since the majority of sites that will be able to afford to stay online are ones that will be backed by right wing money.

News organizations and other content providers are not going to give up their ghost so easily, of course. Some of the solutions, like the Australian law that forced internet platforms to forge content deals with news providers worked. But those kinds of arrangements tend to favor the large new organizations, leaving the local and alternative views still suffering. Content providers are sure to try and keep AI from scrapping their data, but anti-crapping technology works by convention. If the convention is a threat to Google's search, you can be sure they will ignore it. And then what? Do the powerful media companies fight to make scrapping illegal? You could, in theory, do that surgically, but that would take a level of sophistication that I have yet to see any legislature exercise around technical matters. And given an opening, large media companies would love to use this very real threat to lockdown what consumers can and cannot do with fair use and the media they purchase to an even greater extent than they already do. And even then, that would not really solve the issue, because it would likely cripple search in general, leading to the same issues as overly greedy search. Sites still need eyeballs, somehow, and people still need to find reputable sources of information, or the internet becomes unusable.

Google also has to crack the code of monetization. I am certain that the space for the citation links will come up for sale. Why would Google care which of the similar sites it scrapes from gets the few remaining links that people actually see? I have no doubt they will find a way to auction those links in most cases, making them even more worthless as a source of valid information. And while I will cry no tears for SEO merchants, this will destroy the industry. With the prominence of links decreasing to the point of irrelevancy in most searches, driving link appearances will mean next to nothing. It certainly won't be worth paying for. SEO experts will have to come up with some means of influencing the AI algorithm itself. The easiest way to do that, of course, will be flooding the data it uses to synthesize it answers. We can probably look forward to much, much more inauthentic content, much of it AI generated, to flood the web.

All of this is speculative and none of this is guaranteed to happen, of course, but I think the basic outline is worrying. AI allows for a Google to increase its current practice of synthesizing and summarizing content rather than directing people away from Google products. That acceleration has a materially deleterious effect upon web businesses, which in turn leads to the death of some, desperate measures that decrease the reach and usefulness of the web by others, monetization schemes that lesson the trustworthiness of what results can be produced, and incentives that almost guarantee bad actors and spammers come to eventually dominate the information available for the AIs to synthesize. This cycle doesn't even have to lead to a death spiral of the internet at large. Even modest steps down this road will result in a web less helpful and more dominated by disinformation and bad actors.

Someone once said that there is a lot of ruin in a country. Well, there is a likely a lot of ruin in something as ubiquitous as the web. But as we have seen with the rise of social media, it doesn't take much to make the web less helpful or even actively harmful to people and society at large. Google obviously sees AI driven synthesis as its route into the future. It may just find itself driving down a dead-end.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/11/2168662/-Is-Google-AI-About-to-Destroy-the-Web

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