Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments here are along the lines of "websites are often hostile, and AI summaries are a better user experience" which I agree with for most cases. I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on.

If I create content like recipes, journalism etc, previously I had exclusive rights to my created content and could monetise it however I wanted. This has mostly led to what we have today, some high quality content, lots of low quality content, mostly monetised through user hostile ads.

Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules. I still can't do that, but Google can if it's done through the mechanism of AI summaries.

I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators. The best one is that we find some alternative, third way, for creators to monotise content while maintaining discoverability.

I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm not denying the usefulness of AI summaries, but it feels easy to miss that, at their core, they're a fundamental reworking of the current economics of the internet.

> I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on.

This would be lovely.

> I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether. The most likely one is that search/summary engines eat up money that previously came from content creators.

More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads. No more “the top 25 hats in July 2025” AI slopfest SEO articles when I look for a hat, but a thoughtful series of reviews with no ads or affiliate links, just because someone is passionate about hats. The horror! The horror!

I hope things turn out the way you suggest. If we could return to a pre-2000s, pre-Dotcom boom internet I would be ever so happy, but I'm skeptical.

>More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads.

Why would you do that if you thought it was going to be hoovered up by some giant corporation and spat out again for $20 a month with no attribution.

From my post:

[B]ecause they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads.

Because they like to make stuff more than they value a subscription. I'm gonna write music no matter what happens to it.

I understand that, I’m in the middle of a project right now that has no commercial value to me. What I’m not going to do is offer it up to Google et al so they can profit from it.

> What I’m not going to do is offer it up to Google et al so they can profit from it.

What are you going to do with it? If you publish it, the law currently allows Google to hoover it up and there's nothing you can do about it.

Why publish? If people aren't going to click into it anyway and read it, why not just do it and write it up for yourself? I've been doing this for years (in a way, haven't quite worked writing it up into that) but I explore on my own constantly and try things just with me and my fiance. I still hope to share it someday but this person is right. You don't _have_ to do anything with it once you've done it. You can just work on a project and enjoy the process and then do nothing.

In that instance, google loses value over time because less and less valuable content is published because there's no point because people may read it as an AI summary but probably aren't going to share their own findings or discuss with you anyway.

It's so easy to say that when your income is not dependable on writing music.

"Writing is its own reward"

― Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

"… and now its Sam Altman’s reward too!"

― Jayden Milne (2025). https://jayd.ml/about/

I think both are true.

> More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter and not because it is an angle to “create content” or “gain followers” or show ads. No more “the top 25 hats in July 2025” AI slopfest SEO articles when I look for a hat, but a thoughtful series of reviews with no ads or affiliate links, just because someone is passionate about hats. The horror! The horror!

I disagree with that. There are still people out there doing that out of passion, that hasn't changed (it's just harder to find). Bad actors who are only out there for the money will continue trying to get the money. Blogs might not be relevant anymore, but social media influencing is still going to be a thing. SEO will continue to exist, but now it's targeted to influence AIs instead of the position in Google search results. AIs will need to become (more) profitable, which means they will include advertising at some point. Instead of companies paying Google to place their products in the search or influencers through affiliate links, they will just pay AI companies to place their products in AI results or influencers to create fake reviews trying to influence the AI bots. A SEO slop article is at least easy to detect, recommendations from AIs are much harder to verify.

Also it's going to hit journalism. Not everyone can just blog because they are passionate about something. Any content produced by professionals is either going to be paywalled even more or they need to find different sources of income threatening journalistic integrity. And that gives even more ways to bad actors with money to publish news in their interest for free and gaining more influence on the public debate.

It's not going to happen this way, because these days for you to get somewhere near the top of Google results requires you to be an established content publisher, basically anyone with enough followers.

Someone who publishes content because they love the subject matter would only reach enough of an audience to have an impact if they work on it, a lot, and most people wouldn't do that without some expectation of return on investment, so they'd follow the influencer / commercial publication playbook and end up in the same place as the established players in the space are already.

If you're satisfied of being on the 50th page on the Google results, then that's fine. Nobody will find you though.

Being passionate about hats is one thing, but being passionate about sharing something you care about with others is the real driver for publishing. As LLMs degrade web discoverability through search (summaries+slop results), there's no incentive for the latter people to continue publishing on the open web or even the bot-infested closed gardens.

The web is on a trajectory where a local dyi zine will reach as many readers as an open website. It might even be cheaper than paying for a domain+hosting once that industry contracts and hosting plans aren't robust enough to keep up with requests from vibe-coded scrapers.

And Google would still use AI to get money by using that content without having to access your website. Besides that, creating content IS work for a lot of people. Ads and affiliated links are part of the monetization model that works the best, sadly. What you are saying is "people should just code for fun and curiosity, their income should come from elsewhere" while Google is making money with Gemini. It's not necessarily wrong, but it sounds dismissive.

> This would be lovely.

I agree the current model sucks, but I think it being replaced is only good if it's replaced with something better.

> More than likely, people return to publishing content because they love the subject matter

I'd love the idea of people doing things because they're passionate, but I feel a little unsure about people doing things because they're passionate, generating money from those things, but all that money going to AI summariser companies. I think there's some pretty serious limits too, journalists risk their safety a lot of the time, and I can't see a world where that happens purely out of "passion" without any renumeration. Aside from anything else, some acts of journalism like overseas reporting etc, isn't compatible with working a seperate "for-pay" job.

It's crazy how few people see it that way. Big tech is capturing all the value created by content creators, and it's slowly strangling the independent web it feeds on. It's a parasitic relationship. Once the parasite has killed its host, it will feed on its users.

>If I create content like recipes ... previously I had exclusive rights to my created content

Recipes are not protected by copyright law. That's _why_ recipe bloggers have resorted to editorialising recipes, because the editorial content is copyrightable.

Haha, you've exposed that I know absolutely nothing about copyright law! That's a great point, but I think my original point still stands if you swap out my full-of-holes example for a type of content that is copyrightable.

> I think the worst case scenario is that people stop publishing content on the web altogether

Quite clearly heading in that direction, but with a twist: the only people left will be advertising or propaganda, if there's no money in authenticity or correctness.

There was little to no money in authenticity or correctness in the heyday of home pages and personal blogs. People published because they were excited about sharing information and opinions. That was arguably the internet at its best.

> I think the main thing to be worried about is that this model is undermining the fundamental economic model the internet's currently based on.

And this is the reason why Google took its sweet time to counter OpenAI's GPT3. They _had_ to come up with this, which admittedly disrupts the publishers business model but at least if Google is successful they will keep their moat as the first step in any sales funnel.

> Previously, if I wanted to take a recipe from "strawberry-recipes.cool" and published it on my own website with a better user experience, that wouldn't have been allowed because of copyright rules

This is not true, you absolutely could have republished a recipe with your own wording and user experience.

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