Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.
The situation may be even worse. Back in the labor of love era, at least webmasters could get feedback from readers. In the LLM era, readers may not even know that the site exists. Without feedback/community, the overall quality of those sites will decrease over time.
On the old internet, "know one knows that you're a dog."
On the new internet, "know one knows (for sure) that you're an AI."
In a mixed discussion consisting of both AI and human participants, AI could generate interesting discussions and recite novel-sounding statements for ongoing ones. It doesn't sound plausible to me that an avalanche of profit-driven LLMs would even post -- I would think they'd be the lurkers. My take would be that LLMs actively participating, depending on the content they post, are also labors of love by some nerd out there trying to make the best LLM.
Drain all the profit motives and rent-seeking from the web, and even something like AI joining discussions doesn't sound scary.
ChatGPT/Claude does this today. I barely click or care for the source when they already have me the info I wanted.
My speculation is all information worth anything is going to be behind some kind of wall.
Maybe I'm just #builtdifferent, but I click these a lot. Especially if I'm trying to research or make a decision on something, I want the actual source and not the potentially-fudged summary.
Not to mention the hallucinations
Similarly, if I use Gemini uses a website for an answer, it should pay something to those sites for the information it gathered. Sites would need to sign up to earn via Google, and I'd imagine there would be a certain threshold to cross to make it worth cutting checks... but that would make all these AI search tools feel much less scummy while providing site owners an incentive to keep sharing information on the internet.
Where a model like this would get messy is with sites like reddit. It's a very popular source for AI search, but the value comes from the users, not the platform itself.
The problem with all this AI/llm stuff is that end users doesn't even know your tiny site with a lot of useful information exists at all.
This depends on implementation. I primarily use Kagi for any LLM stuff. I cites pretty much everything and links out to the source. I regularly use this for search. The normal search results may not have what I need, but a line in the AI results sounds better and I click through to the source to get more context.
I find clicking through to the source is important, as I've often seen the AI get it wrong. The page has what I need on it, but the AI grabbed the wrong thing and got it backward. I'm probably in the minority, I'm guessing most people don't use LLMs like this.
- in the past Google was the entry point for everything, I was opening every single site at the top of my search and navigate through it. E.g.: if the site was a Reddit or HN post I was reading comments, following links, ecc
- today I'm using google 1 in 3 times and I mostly read the "AI Overview" section. The other 2 out of 3 I go directly into chatgtp, claude or gemini and rarely follow any links.
[0] But I see the same pattern basically in all of my colleagues, friends and relatives.
If I'm gonna lose my job, at least give me that in return