As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
Yes, but search engines will serve you LLM generated slop instead of search results, and sites like Stack Overflow will die due to lack of visitors, so the internet will become a reddit-like useless LLM ridden hellscape completely devoid of any human users, and we’ll have to go back to our grandparents’ old dusty paper encyclopedias.
Eventually, in a decade or two, once the bubble has burst and google, meta, and all those bastards have starved each other to death, we might be able to start rebuilding a new internet, probably reinventing usenet over ad-hoc decentralised wifi networks, but we won’t get far, we’ll die in the global warming wars before we get it to any significant size.
At least some bastards will have made billions out of the scam, though, so there’s that, I suppose. 🤷♂️