Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the latest tech executive to ring the warning bells for a near-term dystopian AI scenario.
Speaking to WIRED’s Big Interview Podcast on Tuesday, Prince said that he thinks the days of search engines being “the dominant interface of the web” are already long gone.
“Now, if you run a search, it gives you back an answer at the top of the page. It doesn’t give you a treasure map. Instead, it provides you with what they call an AI Overview, which has taken a whole bunch of content, smashed it together, summarized it in various ways, and synthesized it,” Prince said.
He is not the only person ringing the doomsday bells for internet search. Earlier this month, a federal judge delivered a surprising verdict in an antitrust lawsuit over Google’s search engine monopoly, when he let the tech giant keep its search engine, Chrome. His reasoning was that he believed generative AI finally presented “a meaningful challenge to Google’s market dominance” in internet search.
AI is not a search engine, Prince says, but an “answer engine,” and it fails to drive traffic, which is what keeps internet content creators like researchers, writers, journalists, and more paid.
As answer engines continue taking over from search engines, Prince thinks we are staring down three possible futures.
The first future he thinks is unlikely to happen: Journalism, academic research, etc., will all completely die and be taken over by AI. Basically, the “dead internet theory,” according to which much of online content is created by and interacted with via bots, a natural end state of engagement-driven revenue generation strategy from online content.
But AI feeds off of content written by humans; it doesn’t freshly generate it, so that’s looking rather unlikely, he thinks.
The second possibility, however, is “frighteningly likely to happen,” Prince says. He calls it the “Black Mirror possibility.”
In this scenario, he thinks every content creator, from journalists to researchers, will be employed by a handful of AI companies in a system that is going to resemble the 1400s, when artists, thinkers, and writers were all patronized by a handful of powerful families like the Medici family of Florence, Italy. The Medicis were a powerful family that funded the work of many artists and thinkers, but also furthered their political power by controlling information output and making sure it promoted their own ideologies.
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