‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters,’
wrote anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci in 1924. A hundred years later, we are struggling with the same weltschmerz. Online, too. The web we knew for thirty years is disappearing. Advertising models, page views, attention and news value are proving irrelevant to AI responses.
Who killed the web?
ChatGPT fired the first shot. From your niece to your neighbour, everyone now uses “chat” as a friend and source of information. Chatbots are replacing Google, while Google is now doing the opposite: presenting results in “AI Mode”. As a result, visitor numbers are falling, and it is less profitable to fill sites with new content: after all, advertisements generate fewer views. Texts are no longer read by people, but “understood” by an AI agent. Generative language models have no notion of what is true or biased. While bots graze the last bits of the old web, what remains is a carcass with a few idealists. Common publication and distribution rules are passé: SEO writing and headline writing are becoming redundant, and reach and urgency are no longer necessary to catch AI’s attention. These are the monsters we know.
Freelancers who understand Query Fan-Out on are assured of work.
What do we feed AI with (when the old web will be gone)?
You will soon be writing for machines that do Query Fan-Out. This means that chatbots split each search query into follow-up questions (fanning out). Your content, published in a special format for AI bots, becomes relevant when it potentially answers as many sub-questions as possible. Anticipate this by structuring relationships between people, things and concepts in your story. Make your work quotable rather than clickable. Not SEO, but GAIO: Generative AI Optimisation. Freelancers who take this on are assured of work.
Who will pay for journalism in the future?
For every answer that Google or OpenAI generates based on your text (or item or image), you will be compensated with a micro-fee. That’s the idea. But of course, you’re not the only supplier. Do you write about baseball, the universe or Hungary? Then Eurosport, the Zoo and Booking.com also want to appear in AI answers about those topics. Apparently, we will never get rid of some monsters. The difference is that you will soon be paid directly for every piece of content used, for every sub-question you(r content) helped answer. Sounds more attractive than the old web advertising model, right?
What do users think?
Whether the general audience is helped by AI answers is still an open question (pun intended). If the original work of journalists is only “seen” by machines and shown to users as an unrecognisable part of an AI word salad, in an uncontrollable environment, brought to them by commercial, non-transparent, undemocratic techcongolomerates… then we still have many monsters to defeat.
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This article was originally published in Dutch, commissioned by Villamedia Magazine.