The End Of The Web As We Know It
And I feel weird. Plus some climate content to balance the A.I. everything
Photo of trees and partially cloudy sky. Black and white for dramatic effect.
Hi you,
This week I’m doing a better job of getting this newsletter to you closer to the Puck edition (which you really want to unlock and read because it’s a doozy). But for the top part, here we go!
The exponential developments in A.I. have continued over the past week. To balance out that world, I’ve been walking barefoot outside as much as possible and listening to author and speaker Poonam Sharma’s very human podcast, The Release, which features guest interviews that go well beneath the surface. Here’s what else is grabbing my attention:
The Washington Post offers a harrowing picture from the point of view of doctors in Gaza. “Over seven months of war, Israel has besieged and destroyed Gaza’s most critical medical facilities, detaining doctors and other health-care workers, and forcing the staff of at least two hospitals to bury dead patients in mass graves.” It’s important not to look away from such stories. Listening to right wing voices in the U.S., you’d forget that the foundation of the criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war is scenes like these. It’s true that there’s been a dramatic rise in antisemitism (well-explored in this NPR conversation featuring my colleague Julia Ioffe). It’s also true that massive crowds in Israel are protesting Netanyahu and demanding a ceasefire and hostage return because they recognize that the safety of Israelis and Palestinians is intertwined.
My friend and extraordinary climate warrior Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson was recently featured in the NYT’s The Interview series. At one point she flips the interview on the interviewer, David Marchese, and asks him, “What are you so afraid of giving up?” when it comes to doing what’s needed to keep Earth livable. It’s a question we should all answer in the face of accelerating climate disaster and the zealous moves of the fossil fuel industry to protect its investments by criminalizing protest. I’ve previously mentioned Johnson’s extraordinary anthology book, All We Can Save, and in a few months, her own book comes out: What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.
While on the subject of women leading in the climate fight, Colette Pichon Battle’s talk at the Bioneers conference is now online. I mentioned her and this extraordinary conference a few weeks ago. Battle is co-founder of Taproot Earth, an organization born out of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation to support frontline community responses to the climate crisis.
Finally, in the Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For Department, NBC News has the story of the Satanic Temple using the conservative push to insert religion in schools to put Satanism in schools as well. Hilarious. Appropriate. Let’s go. And, if you know, you know. “Bleach Blond, Bad Built, Butch Body.” Thank you Willonius Hatcher for memorializing this moment between Congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett.
And now, let’s talk about that possible internet apocalypse, shall we?
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It
Shortly after my recent piece about how generative A.I. search engine Perplexity is changing the web, the media and tech executive Geoff Isenman emailed me a poignant question on the minds of many web philosophers. Isenman wondered about the growing fear that increasingly sophisticated A.I. search will disincentivize digital content creators from publishing in the first place, and without that, he asked, “what will Perplexity summarize?” After all, Perplexity offers natural-language responses to queries instead of unfurling a list of relevant web pages. Will web consumers continue to visit sites and read articles when the information you’re looking for can be summarized in a tidy paragraph in mere seconds?
His question took on new urgency this week. At Google’s I/O developer conference, on Tuesday, Alphabet announced that it’s effectively going full throttle on artificial intelligence—expanding its own A.I. search summaries to all U.S.-based users before rolling out the function to billions more globally by the end of the year. It was another leap toward what The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel has ominously called “Google Zero”—the day when websites get no more referral traffic from the search giant. And because big A.I. developments come in waves, earlier this week Sam Altman’s OpenAI released GPT-4o, which is essentially a working version of the A.I. assistant from the movie Her. This new version also integrates web searches, so it’s only a matter of time before OpenAI fully takes on web search as well.
Sure, these developments are making headlines. But lately, I’ve been much more curious about the impacts of Meta’s plunge into A.I. About a month ago, Meta integrated its Meta AI chatbot—which feeds on its large language model, the open-source Llama 3—across its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. At the top of my WhatsApp chat’s screen, for example, the search function has been replaced by a prompt to “Ask Meta AI or search.” For now, the A.I. responses feel like the basic chatbot stuff of mid- to late 2023. (I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it already feels old.) But it’s wrong to dismiss the relative simplicity of the product today, because as we’ve seen, everything changes all the time in this field—and fast. The bigger question is where this is going, what it means for the web and consumers, and the implications for the increasingly crowded generative A.I. field.
The rest is in Puck! Here’s what’s included in the full article
Meta’s disruption through the open source path could devalue major investments from competitors like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
The irony of Mark Zuckerberg positioning Meta as the champion of the underdog.
The risks of Meta's strategy, especially around spreading misinformation and rapidly pushing the bounds of unsettled IP concerns with AI.
Big picture questions about what “social” even is as we humanize synthetic bots and agents.