AI Is Eating Its Own Tail And Biting The Hand That Feeds It
The AI information economy Is screwed.
I have called the AI boom a death cult before because it is in so many different ways. From its total lack of financial sustainability to its horrific environmental impact to the veritable psychopathic psychosis of the tech bros pushing this technology onto us, every decision made is an almost fetishistic attempt to dominate us and prove to Daddy Shareholder that they are still the golden child. But the elephant in the room is the other way AI is spiralling towards destruction. You see, AI is choking the data economy to death, which is the foundation that the generative AI industry depends on, in two distinct ways.
The “Biting The Hand” Problem
Let’s start with what I’m calling the “biting the hand” problem.
It’s not exactly a secret that AI needs to be constantly fed a metric f**k ton of training data in order to stay up-to-date, which has meant tech companies have been compelled to scrape the internet to source enough. After all, copyright isn’t a thing… right? It’s also no secret that, to justify the insane cost of AI, tech companies have been shoving it down our throats and trying to get us to access services or information through these bots.
For a while, most people seemed to think these problems only materially affected other people, such as professional authors or writers. But, as it turns out, this is a problem that affects us all.
A recent report from Chartbeat and Axios investigated how Google’s AI search summaries were affecting online publishers of all sizes. To no one’s surprise, it turns out they are being utterly mullered.
Small publishers, such as sites with 1,000 to 10,000 daily views, have experienced a 60% decline in traffic from Google. Medium publishers, such as sites with 10,000 to 100,000 daily visits, saw a 47% drop, and large publishers, with more than 100,000 daily visits, saw a 22% drop! Another study found that online publishers saw an 80% decline in traffic from AI summaries.
Pew has the answer to what is causing this decline. They found that users are far less likely to click on links when Google’s AI summary appears in the results. In fact, users are twice as likely to click on links when this feature isn’t active!
Why is that bad? Well, even after this monumental downturn, Google Search remains the dominant source of traffic for these publishers.
Just to remind you, the term “publishers” doesn’t just include news websites. It also refers to recipe websites, how-to websites, blogs, and independent voices — basically, anything you read online.
Now, here’s the thing: these publishers need traffic to generate the income that sustains them. Less traffic means less money. Less money means these sites produce less content. That means that these AIs will have less valuable data to be trained on.
Can you see the problem here? AI is biting the hand that feeds it.
Apparently, using AI to replace human connections crushes the human output AI depends upon. Who would have thought?
