Google and AI are placing the written word under serious threat
For all too long tech pretended it cared about the creativity of users in all mediums - but the mask has well and truly been removed
SUMMARY
Google’s AI mode is overtaking its search engine and increasingly making content production obsolete
Despite the fact that AI models require words to populate its sections, it is going to move content creators out of the space
We, as an industry, are partly to blame for the continued reliance upon Google as a driver of traffic and, therefore, revenue
Dear reader, if you are coming here for some encouragement or reassurance that the tech companies are not, in fact, out to obliterate the entire web eco-system for their own self-interests and that of their shareholders, I have nothing for you.
The content creators, the people that made the internet what it is today, have been left completely unprotected by governments who have, let’s face it, always been years behind what the progressive technological moment of our time is. And on this one, they are so far behind the ramifications of AI it would be laughable if it weren’t terrifying.
This is a full-blown AI arms race, where the goal is to try and capture as many users in your AI environment as possible, and to hell with the businesses - and humans - that stand in its way. For most new emergents such as OpenAI and Anthropic, it isn’t massively impacting ‘old internet’ businesses - yet.
But Google’s position as ultimate gatekeeper of the internet, and the nefarious methods it used to solidify its monopoly, means when they change things, lives are changed as a result. And in the past half decade it has been unquestionably for the worse, on every single occasion.
Google’s mantra - don’t be evil - is gone. They are a company that is terrified of becoming irrelevant and for the first time in a decade they feel vulnerable. So instead of attempting to enhance and assist the pursuit for truth, they’d rather feed you whatever information it can dredge up to keep you in its dying environment.
There is no long game for content here and that’s where us, the content creators, should be seriously concerned. We as a collective firstly relied on Facebook for all too long, and then, latterly, Google. It was a non-reciprocal relationship that we all secretly knew would come to an end. Well, it’s coming. And what happens next really is a totally new frontier for the concept of writing itself.
Most people can’t read
It’s not in doubt that the general public have long been unable to determine the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ piece of writing. It was like this long before AI, but the chatbots have merely dotted those i’s and crossed those t’s.
The amount of social posts listed with ‘wow’ as some techbro copies in a regurgitation of an opinion from one of their many apps hurts the soul. There’s little self-reflection that no, the AI isn’t ‘writing’ anything - because it’s not conscious.
These tools are just better than ever before at constructing sentences from the wide web’s many sources on that particular topic, and coalescing them into something that, to a layman, sounds like it makes sense. Apple’s report which released over the weekend absolutely obliterates the idea that these Large Language Models (LLM’s) will lead us to the supposed end goal of General Intelligence.
But it’s no better a writer than Alexa is at being a public speaker. The question will be, though - does that even matter any more?
Last year I made an impassioned ode to good sports writing but it’s harder than ever to find among the walled gardens and the auto-generated slop.
Perhaps Substack is indeed the last bastion of this type of content but as seasoned campaigners know, making it pay is an altogether different challenge. There’s subscription models within the product, but converting users from free consumers to paid requires a level of USP that many standard news publishers simply don’t have.
So you better have something interesting to say, and have the time to say it regularly and promote the hell out of it, in order to garner the audience interest you’ll need.
Publishers helped make it this way
But we have to take our own responsibility for shaping the eco-system in which Google now operates. The content gaming that was informational SEO was an unedifying experience for everyone from the writer to the end user and to that extent, informational intent searches on Google were in the toilet long before Google started stealing them.
It’s not surprising that Google tried to ‘fix’ this. If we go back a few years we had knowledge panels. Before that, People Also Ask. And even earlier, Google straight up stripping fixtures and results from football sites and placing them right there in the browser. This is simply the latest incarnation, but this is the one that puts the writing itself at such major risk.
The business model of the internet relies on the discoverability of not only websites, but different content perspectives. An AI delivery mechanism simply cannot provide that in any kind of nuanced way no matter how advanced it gets.
So there’s hope for news in the short-term. But in the long-term?
A redefinition of the news culture
So what’s going to happen next?
Well, it’s increasingly likely that the number of publishers will decrease - that is a given. To what extent, we don’t quite know yet. But having something that can set you apart as a publication - and perhaps more importantly if this is your line of work - as a journalist - is fast becoming a career imperative. I can’t stress that enough.
There’s also a seismic shift in the consumption of content in general - the Tiktok-ification of all major social platforms to the point of extreme irrelevance of major news.
To these platforms, anyone and everyone is a content producer, and it’s preferable for them to disseminate the measly revenue they allow the producers to create among tens of thousands of them rather than risk any of them becoming too big for their boots.
Being able to navigate your way to a smaller, but more loyal as opposed to a transactional audience is also likely to be the route forward.
But to return to the top, just like if an search engine optimisation expert sells you the idea of getting traffic from AI mode, if anyone knows with certainty what happens next they are lying. All we can try to do is continue to traverse this space and attempt to future-proof - in whatever ways we have left.