How would the web work in an increasingly AI-fied world

Om - Has search become just a feature:

The atomization of information is unfolding rapidly. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just search; it synthesizes, contextualizes, and presents information in a user’s preferred format. AI agents fetch needed information, distill it and deliver it without requiring users to visit individual webpages. The traditional web — with its banners, pop-ups, and paywalls — increasingly feels like a relic from a less sophisticated era.

But perhaps most telling is how natural this all feels. The chat just works better than the old way of searching. It’s more human, more intuitive, and more useful. We’re not just witnessing a new feature being added to our digital toolset – we’re watching the emergence of a new way of interacting with information itself.

I have thoughts on AI, about how things are going and how things might turn out in the future.

I am a writer on the internet. My thoughts are bound to be tainted by what I view as an attack on the open web, on its very existence. Google Search was filled with spam and SEO bait since long. There exist products like Kagi however. In addition, most of these LLMs now have an ability to search the web.

I do agree with Om's characterisation of how natural this feels. Asking the chat-bot in natural language. And it providing an answer in the same natural language. One of my favourite things about Copilot is the links it provides at the end of anything I ask for. My default thinking is that I do not trust what comes out of an LLM, but compared to Google, it has a way of surfacing information which Google just does not show many times. So, after I get an answer, I click on the links and see where the information is sourced from.

I use RSS to subscribe, follow and read many of the things I am interested in. It is not common though. The rest of the world does not read that way. The rest of the world does not read that much. Period.

I am not here to make money from this site. I would some times ask you to buy a book. But that's it.

There are others who do want to make money from their website. I don't know what their future would look like in this LLM eats everything world. Would these companies pay for the newspapers, magazines and blogs?

This might be the default way we search for things going forward. It would make sense to figure out how would the people writing on the web, whose work is being plundered right now, would be paid.