4 ways Generative AI is Changing the Internet

In the previous months, we've seen some big tech leaders making strange decisions regarding their companies. 

X, formerly known as Twitter, enforced stringent rate limits that had a negative impact on user experience. Similarly, Reddit introduced a costly pricing structure for its API, causing dissatisfaction among its loyal users. These events, although distinct, share a common thread. They manifest a broader trend shaping the online world: the conflict between generative AI and abundant content-rich platforms. This clash is significantly altering the digital landscape.

What is Generative AI?#

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that helps create different types of content, including images, videos, audio, and data. Generative AI is manipulating and will keep manipulating the data users see online. As time progresses, we can expect generative AI to become even more advanced, producing more realistic and sophisticated content. The focus will likely be refining the quality of generated content, improving model stability, and addressing potential biases in the data that these systems could amplify. 

What is X's Gameplan? #

Companies like X, Reddit, Quora, and StackOverflow are well-known content-rich platforms. An increasing number of bots are being built to scrape, index, and read these platforms. As the traffic is increasing on content-rich platforms and Artificial Intelligence is taking over, these platforms are limiting free content availability. 

The motive behind this strategy is not based on ethics but is more of a business move. Companies want to actively prevent bots from scraping data to feed AI models. These social platforms have a massive library of human conversations that is economically valuable. But with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language models, human-based data is in high demand. In fact, in X/Twitter's rate limiting product update, that reason is first on their list:

"At a high level, we are working to prevent … [bots and other bad actors] … from

1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and

2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways."

Generative AI models consume the content they get from the Internet and give us the precise answer we want. The more it will have user-generated content, the better its results will be. But why should companies offer this data to Generative AI for free?

Businesses are putting a price to see the available data so that users and GenAI have to pay for what they see. Whether through subscriptions, logins, or rate limiting, each platform is now implementing different ways to restrict access to their content. As they lock down content, they essentially become a new breed of "content farms," offering quality content at a cost for AI models. 

How Generative AI Will Reshape the Internet?#

Generative AI is rising, and there is no doubt that it will cause major disruptions around us. It is exciting to see the revolution artificial intelligence can make. But at the same time, with this exciting potential comes the need for vigilant safeguards against spreading misinformation and fake content. In this evolving digital paradigm, understanding the impact of Generative AI and establishing ethical guidelines will be critical to harness its power responsibly and shaping a future innovative and trustworthy internet.

Search Experiences #

Generative AI is set to transform the search experience significantly. By enabling more natural language understanding, users can express their queries in everyday language, resulting in more accurate and relevant search results.

That said, our search experiences may be impacted in ways we don't yet know. Earlier this year, Google (and to a lesser extent Bing) announced plans to add AI to the Search experience, striking fear into content platforms. Websites have welcomed Google to index their webpages because Google sent them organic traffic in return. However, if Google is able to replace the traditional search engine model with generative AI, there will be no incentive for Google to distribute organic traffic to the highest ranking web pages. Without organic traffic, content platforms and other websites will wither on the vine — and there's no telling yet what the search experience would look like for us.

Public Access to Content-Rich Platforms#

Just like X and Reddit, we will be expecting more social platforms to shut down their free services and move to subscription-based or other paid packages. Content-rich sites need users to log in, and the APIs will be paywalled. So it will be more difficult to build 3rd party applications that gather information from these platforms. 

Global Information Exchange#

In previous years, the Internet was focused on making the world a "Global Village" where you can access all the information. Well, you will still be able to do that, but the Internet will be less open. There will be geographic censorship and restrictions that will limit your access. This may even occur on a country-wide scale. It's nothing new for countries to control the internet access of their citizens. We have already seen the United States debating whether or not to ban TikTok.

The Vision of the Internet#

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has always advocated for making humanity's knowledge open and accessible to all. However, with proposed changes to Search and the potential division of the global Internet, AI is the exception to having free access to information. Though they're backed by and created for humans, AI models will only be as good as the information they can afford to accumulate and maintain. 

These changes move the profit-focused bottom line front and center and put the vision of a free, open, and accessible internet directly in the hands of market forces. What was originally dreamed up as a leap forward in human knowledge may exist only in the delicate balance between AI companies and the organizations that hold the keys to content, news, and information.

The Future of Software Development#

Software development is not going out of trend anytime soon. However, with the advent of Generative AI, the future of software development will expand in various niches. Generative AI will help software developers streamline their tasks and efficiency, but it can't replace our creativity and problem-solving skills. In other words, it won't replace developer jobs anytime soon — in fact, it will bring more work our way.

Moving forward, AI experiences will have to be integrated into every application in the world. AI will be under the hood to enhance features that help streamline simple tasks for us. For instance, autocomplete will get more effective, and Excel sheets may be able to respond to human input instead of formulas. Applications that haven't seen major changes in decades — like word processors — can now open up to various improvements with AI. These AI enhancements will have to be built into applications by developers. With that, it's an exciting time to be a developer. 

If you haven't already added AI and ML technologies to your toolkit, the courses Become a Machine Learning Engineer and Zero to Hero in Python for Machine Learning can help you get hands-on with this new skillset.

Regardless of your background in development, understanding how to harness generative AI can enhance both your efficiency and professional opportunities. However, achieving this demands a distinct skill: the art of prompt engineering. By acquiring the ability to offer suitable context, limitations, and other elements, you can effectively achieve desired outcomes using tools like ChatGPT. Our latest AI-guided courses are designed to assist you in becoming proficient in this skill: All You Need to Know About Prompt Engineering.

The era we're currently in is unparalleled. Although certain shifts may be unsettling, I encourage you to embrace the chance to adapt alongside technology. There's never been a more advantageous (or financially rewarding) moment to develop expertise in AI.

 Happy Learning!