Drupal Creator: Websites Needed More Than Ever in the AI Era

To the extent that large language models (and I should note that while I’m focusing on image generation, there are a whole host of companies working on text output as well) are dependent not on carefully curated data, but rather on the Internet itself, is the extent to which AI will be democratized, for better or worse.

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more

The reality is that it is unclear if an AI-driven internet is net-better for the world. Creative destruction, the process of change that leads to the destruction of existing economic structures, has long pushed society forward. But the internet is so important, and the impact of AI’s change is so dramatic, that it is hard for me to comprehend what ... See more

There is simply no path forward for a news outlet of any meaningful size trying to support itself on social and search traffic. So what will be the A.I. platform publishing strategy? Well, I’m going to make a couple predictions and we’ll see how I do:

1. The conversational A.I. search results will get better and quickly make the human-generated results

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The fight between creators and AI companies is fierce. The current paradigm in AI is to build bigger and bigger models, and there is, at least currently, no getting around the fact that they require vast data sets hoovered from the internet to train on.

Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more

In a digitally decentralized world where generative AI can lower the barriers of creation even farther than ever before, and bots can be trained under the perspective of your choosing, an already fractured reality becomes at risk for disintegration. Or, as science-fiction writer and professional futurist Madeline Ashby told us in a recent interview... See more