With the emergence of AIGC tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, AI-powered content, information, and bots have been rapidly integrated into Web sites over the past year.

However, along with the convenience and efficiency these tools bring, fake users, spam ads, and misinformation have followed.

Just days ago, a social app startup, IRL (IN REAL LIFE), was once valued at $1.7 billion and raised $170 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank. As a result, an internal board investigation found that 95% of the company's 20 million monthly users were "bots".

Recently, NewsGuard, a company that provides trust ratings for online news media, released a new analysis showing that due to the advertising budgets of major global brands such as tech giants and banks, they are providing advertising revenue to AI-generated low-quality websites, allowing these AI-generated low-quality content sites to receive significant financial support and continue to survive.

In this regard, The Verge reporter James Vincent concluded, "Now AI is killing the old Web and the new Web is being born with difficulty. And in his opinion, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Generative AI can create large amounts of text and images in just a few minutes

The Verge points out that in a broad sense, years ago, Web sites used to be a place for individuals to create innovations, and many people developed sites, forums and mailing lists on the Web to make a little money.

Later, many companies were formed and felt they could do better, so they created flexible and feature-rich platforms and opened the doors for more people to join them.

It's a little bit like, they put boxes in front of us, we fill those boxes with text and images, and people come to see what's in those boxes. These companies chase scale because once enough people gather here, there's usually a way to make money from it.

But the advent of artificial intelligence has changed those assumptions.

With ChatGPT, Bard, and the new Bing popular today, they can quickly generate large amounts of text and images, as well as produce music and video.

Realistically, their output may surpass the news, information, and entertainment platforms we rely on.

Advertising revenue feeds a large number of AI-generated news and information sites

According to data released by NewsGuard, which has been tracking AI-generated news and information sites (UAINs) since May of this year, it finds 25 new UAINs every week, and today there are probably hundreds of AI-generated content sites.

So what's the point of having these sites filled with tons of AI content?

NewsGuard points out that one of the key points is that they are the place where many brand companies are placing their ads.

Analysts have found that the ads placed on these UAIN sites are programmatically generated, meaning that many well-known companies don't choose to place their own ads on UAIN, but are targeted by the ad placement system, most of which are placed by Google Ads.

NewsGuard says that their analysts have added 217 sites to their UAIN site tracker, many of which appear to be funded entirely by programmatic advertising.

Because sites can make money from programmatic ads, they have an incentive to publish content frequently. The company found one of these UAIN sites that published about 8,600 articles during the week of June 9 to June 15 this year, an average of about 1,200 articles per day.

By comparison, the New York Times, a news site that publishes about 150 articles per day, has a large number of editors and reporters behind it.

In fact, in the most recent study conducted in May and June of this year, NewsGuard analysts browsed sites in the U.S., Germany, France and Italy and found 393 programmatic ads from 141 major brands appearing on 55 of 217 UAIN sites.

Such trends, based on advertising revenue, are keeping alive a plethora of new AI-generated news and information sites that are flooding the Web.

Old Web sites are being "baptized" by AI

In addition, a lot of AI-generated content has infiltrated many older communities and platforms, such as LinkedIn, which is using AI to activate users; Snapchat and Instagram, which want bots to talk to you when your friends aren't talking, and so on.

At the same time, some Web sites are also being passively impacted by ChatGPT, such as Stack Overflow, a well-known community of programmers.

But stopping the expansion of AI use isn't the answer, and Stack Overflow is targeting AI use with plans to charge companies that crawl their data when building their own AI tools. In addition, Stack Overflow itself has plans to offer AI-related services.

Another platform that will be impacted by AI is the Q&A community Reddit. "Reddit's data is valuable, but we don't need to give it all away for free to some of the biggest companies in the world," said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, signaling that the company is making a move. The company was about to make a move.

To no one's surprise, when it updated its Reddit API fee policy to generate more revenue and to give some value to its data, it was met with protests from many moderators who blocked the community section.

Finally, as the gateway to many websites, Google, the world's number one search engine, holds the lifeblood of modern Web sites. However, driven by the trend of Bing AI and ChatGPT as alternative search engines, Google is also taking action, with media reports suggesting that it is looking to build a new search engine powered by AI technology, with one of the key features of the new engine being the ability to "guess what users want", which will The engine will learn and predict what users want to know based on what they search for, and will provide pre-selected lists of things to buy, research information and other information. If Google does implement this plan, the impact of AI on traditional websites will be huge.

What happens when you put AI at the helm of a Web site?

There's no doubt that AI is becoming ubiquitous, so what would happen if all platforms were cannibalized by AI?

In response, Avram Piltch, editor-in-chief of the tech site Tom's Hardware, points out that while AI has the ability to restructure text, it's people who ultimately create the underlying data - whether it's a journalist picking up the phone to fact-check, or a Reddit user who can happily tell you when they have a battery problem how to fix it.

In contrast, the information generated by AI language models and chatbots is often not always right, and more problematic is that when it is wrong, the way it is wrong is often hard to spot. As a result, it takes time and expertise to further verify.

If machine-generated content replaces human authorship, there is less chance of correcting our collective mistakes when there is more AI itself making mistakes on top of the original human-only mistakes, and even somewhat hindering the ability to draw on human expertise.

At the same time, The Verge reporter James Vincent points out that the impact of AI on the Web is not so simple to summarize. Even in the few examples cited above, there are many different mechanisms at work.

In his view, the most successful sites tend to be those that use scale to their advantage, either by increasing social connections or product selection, or by sorting through the vast swarms of information that make up the Internet itself, but that scale relies on large numbers of humans to create potential value, and humans clearly can't beat AI when it comes to mass production.

But is this necessarily a bad thing?

Not really, argues James Vincent, "Some would say it's just one way the world works, and point out that the Web itself killed what came before, and often for the better. Print encyclopedias, for example, are almost extinct, but I prefer the breadth and accessibility of Wikipedia to the thickness and assurance of Encyclopedia Britannica. For all the problems associated with AI-generated writing, there are also many ways to improve it - from improved citation features to more human oversight. Moreover, even though the Web is awash in AI garbage, it may prove useful in spurring the development of better-funded platforms. For example, if Google is always giving you spammy results in search, you may be more inclined to pay for sources you trust and access them directly."

Indeed, the changes currently caused by AI are just the latest in a long struggle in Web history. Essentially, it's a battle over information - who makes it, how it's accessed, and who gets paid. But just because the battle is familiar doesn't mean it isn't important, nor does it guarantee that subsequent systems will be better than the ones we have now. The new Web is trying to be born, and the decisions we make now will determine how it evolves.