When the Web was first designed, some of the concerns we have today were nonexistent.
I believe in freedom of information, and would love for the information I share to be accessed in any way a given user wants.
But I have to stand defensive and support the author here, too. The modern LLM boom aims to essentially replace original resources with AI-generated summaries step by step. This is detrimental to the Internet, and to knowledge as we know and preserve it.
First, there is an event commonly called Google Zero, which is briefly mentioned in the article. If you don’t know what it is, it is the not-so-hypothetical-anymore moment when Google (or, really, any other large player) essentially accumulates all information on the Web, feeds it to AI, and since then doesn’t serve links anymore, going straight to answers based on training data. Users will jump to this - they already do - because it offers convenience. But for any independent creators it means having no audience, no money, and no means to produce new quality content, trapping users in a self-containing loop that loses nuance, actuality, and truthfulness, and stays under corporate control. This goes beyond cooking recipes and personal notes - it permeates science, political discussion, and much more.
Second, LLMs multiply traffic coming to sites, which becomes an infrastructural problem. Bots access sites at much higher rates than humans do, and when their intent is to scrape your entire website every now and again and there are dozens of them, this becomes huge.
Third, having proprietary models train on the data I provide without any attribution, copyright etc. makes giant corporation profit off my back, while at the same thing making it so that less genuine users will see what I produce. This means careers of authors, journalists etc. are dying, and this also means they are left free to abuse each and every one of us without any consent.
Fourth, and I wonder if you see it by now, LLMs and the way they represent data, along with SEO tools meant to drive information through the search bots, begin to shape how we talk. All I say doesn’t have to be a list of points, yet it is. It could be less verbose, more readable, yet it is the way it is. Because when we interact with the products of such developments too much, we begin shaping our own language in a way that is less human-readable and more meant for machines, without us often being aware of it. This is a real issue of communication.
So, as much as I hate it, I’m gonna protect a lot of the data I share.
I fundamentally disagree with all of your claims. The web was already ruined by SEO farms and I know that cause I worked in organic growth for years, AI is not making this worse.
The traffic argument is non-sensical in 2025. serving 200kb html file costs literally nothing. So if you want to write and share something you can do it without spending a single penny, ever.
I understand the frustration and confusion here but all of this whining is lacking any real vision. Information should be free and accessible to all and the rest can be solved without changing this core principle.
So while you “protect” what you share we all will continue to grow and share information freely and actualy contribute real change not start breaking the looms.
Locking information into corporate-controlled loops is antithetical to freedom and accessibility.
Having singular proprietary point of entry, or even few of them, into the entire knowledge of mankind is not sharing.
This is the part people are willing to protect. Actual peer-to-peer sharing of information, with as little private choke points as possible.
And having the web ruined by SEO is not an argument to keep going. It’s already worse than it should be, and search engines already provide worse quality results than before. This needs to be reversed, not reinforced.
When the Web was first designed, some of the concerns we have today were nonexistent.
I believe in freedom of information, and would love for the information I share to be accessed in any way a given user wants.
But I have to stand defensive and support the author here, too. The modern LLM boom aims to essentially replace original resources with AI-generated summaries step by step. This is detrimental to the Internet, and to knowledge as we know and preserve it.
First, there is an event commonly called Google Zero, which is briefly mentioned in the article. If you don’t know what it is, it is the not-so-hypothetical-anymore moment when Google (or, really, any other large player) essentially accumulates all information on the Web, feeds it to AI, and since then doesn’t serve links anymore, going straight to answers based on training data. Users will jump to this - they already do - because it offers convenience. But for any independent creators it means having no audience, no money, and no means to produce new quality content, trapping users in a self-containing loop that loses nuance, actuality, and truthfulness, and stays under corporate control. This goes beyond cooking recipes and personal notes - it permeates science, political discussion, and much more.
Second, LLMs multiply traffic coming to sites, which becomes an infrastructural problem. Bots access sites at much higher rates than humans do, and when their intent is to scrape your entire website every now and again and there are dozens of them, this becomes huge.
Third, having proprietary models train on the data I provide without any attribution, copyright etc. makes giant corporation profit off my back, while at the same thing making it so that less genuine users will see what I produce. This means careers of authors, journalists etc. are dying, and this also means they are left free to abuse each and every one of us without any consent.
Fourth, and I wonder if you see it by now, LLMs and the way they represent data, along with SEO tools meant to drive information through the search bots, begin to shape how we talk. All I say doesn’t have to be a list of points, yet it is. It could be less verbose, more readable, yet it is the way it is. Because when we interact with the products of such developments too much, we begin shaping our own language in a way that is less human-readable and more meant for machines, without us often being aware of it. This is a real issue of communication.
So, as much as I hate it, I’m gonna protect a lot of the data I share.
I fundamentally disagree with all of your claims. The web was already ruined by SEO farms and I know that cause I worked in organic growth for years, AI is not making this worse.
The traffic argument is non-sensical in 2025. serving 200kb html file costs literally nothing. So if you want to write and share something you can do it without spending a single penny, ever.
I understand the frustration and confusion here but all of this whining is lacking any real vision. Information should be free and accessible to all and the rest can be solved without changing this core principle.
So while you “protect” what you share we all will continue to grow and share information freely and actualy contribute real change not start breaking the looms.
Locking information into corporate-controlled loops is antithetical to freedom and accessibility.
Having singular proprietary point of entry, or even few of them, into the entire knowledge of mankind is not sharing.
This is the part people are willing to protect. Actual peer-to-peer sharing of information, with as little private choke points as possible.
And having the web ruined by SEO is not an argument to keep going. It’s already worse than it should be, and search engines already provide worse quality results than before. This needs to be reversed, not reinforced.