The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.
Is Google about to destroy the web?
Google says adding more AI to its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: this era of online history is closing.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
What Was the Internet?
As AI overtakes the web, five writers reflect on how far it’s fallen and what comes next.
Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds
New research from the firm Graphite found that around half of all articles on the internet are AI generated.
Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.
We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.
There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet
“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.
Can AI slop help us save the internet?
Disrupting the status quo and opening space for new visions
Abundance vs. Scarcity: Who Controls the Internet After AI?
AI is straining the open web, forcing a choice between abundance with redistribution and scarcity built on paywalls, writes Paul Keller.
AI Is A Money Trap
In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that
Josh Miller on Twitter / X
What if AI chat is our new front door to the web?Meet "Inline Browsing" in @diabrowser (available today)Now Dia opens webpages *within* your AI chat threads – blurring the lines between 3 categories of software: a web browser, search engine, and AI chat. Let me explain... pic.twitter.com/pRKnCOrroP— Josh Miller (@joshm) July 10, 2025
AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi
Low-quality ‘slop’ generated by AI is crowding out genuine humans across the internet, but instead of regulating it, platforms such as Facebook are positively encouraging it. Where does this end, asks Arwa Mahdawi
The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility
The internet fights over anthropomorphism around the Hugging Face hack.
"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qahd3_v1/
