I'm sad to hear your business model didn't survive the march of technology, but at the same time, this is what's been happening to everyone ultimately. And rightfully, no one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity.
I know this is a real harm to individuals, and bringing this up is not some kind of anti-technological thinking (the luddites were OG with that, and I always argue in favor of them - they had a very valid point).
I also realize that in a few years, I very well may be in the same position here. So will most of us.
But that's a different argument than GP was making, different one from what I replied to. That was about losing culture, and losing a business model is not losing culture.
Also I was with you all the way until the last paragraph:
> AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet.
AI is doing exactly what users want it to - what I too use it for - it bypasses the spam and scams that stand between the user and the solution to their problem. Good riddance, in this.
> Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
And that is just bullshit. AI is not "taking everyone's content and selling it back to users", and the vendors are definitely not "keeping all of the profits" - on the contrary, they haven't even begun to figure out how to monetize almost any of the value their inference services provide, because they have zero visibility into how much any stream of tokens ends up being worth for their customers. They cannot tell whether the plumbing advice the LLM generated unclogged my toilet, or prevented a restaurant from having to close for the day; they cannot tell if the code their agent wrote won me a beer from a friend, or unblocked $2 000 000 dollar opportunity for my business. They capture none of the value from this either way.