It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.
The problem right now is that the incentives have caused most of the output online to be garbage.
- encourage more content because PROFIT
- content becomes garbage
- have to pay those pesky content creators
- slowly squeeze out entire industries by inlining more and more content
- still, not squeezing the juice all the way
- introduce "AI", it just laundries copyrighted content to look original
- bye creators
- for some odd reason people cheer you for this
- creators forced to make their content private
Are you kidding me?
People need to make a living, creating good content isn't easy. Sure a few folks do it for free, but wholesale trying to kill off everyone who does it by making it financially non-viable is long term idiotic. What are you going to train on once everyone stops writing or letting your scrape their data to train from?
Search engines scraping your content is an agreement that they can look at it and use it, and send you traffic if it matches well with a user. Why would anyone subscribe to a deal that there is literally zero benefit except training some AI which will repurpose your knowledge.
Most people that make good content don't make it for money anyway. Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it". They just went and made the site regardless.
Google is a huge part of the reason the old web doesn't exist anymore. Artisanal websites cannot compete for visibility against corporate websites that have staff dedicated to figuring out SEO tricks from every imaginable source: page speed, HTTPS, image compression, meta tags.
The hobbyist back then didn't need to know all this. Today, not having HTTPS alone can cause your site to be hidden from search, even if it is read-only. In that kind of world, only the infinitesimally small minority will bother to make a website on their own dime.
Sites with complex or lengthy information will not fall to LLMs, IMO. No one interested in reading Paul Graham's blog posts is going to just read the AI summary and move on, for example.