Two Harvard professors looked into the future of AI’s impact on the world wide web and what they saw wasn’t pretty. Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and Bruce Schneier, a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School published their projections in The Atlantic.
Here’s a short passage from “It’s the End of the Web As We Know It,”
SEO will morph into LLMO: large-language-model optimization, the incipient industry of manipulating AI-generated material to serve clients’ interests. Companies will want generative-AI tools such as chatbots to prominently feature their brands (but only in favorable contexts); politicians will want the presentation of their agendas to be tailor-made for different audiences’ concerns and biases. Just as companies hire SEO consultants today, they will hire large-language-model optimizers to ensure that LLMs incorporate these preferences in their answers.
In other words, thousands of ‘large-language-model optimizers’ will further game the digital ecosystem, thereby elevating degraded, biased, paid content that people may have little reason to trust.
Is anyone surprised?
Here’s One for the Machine: Humans Readers Are Slow Because We’re Thinking
The professors paint an interesting picture of the future. For one, they imagine a perfectly human reaction to the preponderance of machines. So, there is hope.
Eventually, people may stop writing, stop filming, stop composing—at least for the open, public web. People will still create, but for small, select audiences, walled-off from the content-hoovering AIs. The great public commons of the web will be gone.
Content-hoovering AIs. I like the image inside those words.
Also, some might argue that the great public commons of the web is already gone—devoured many years ago by the insatiable maw of capitalist speculators.
