The rise of merchants of menace: What will the internet of the future look like?

They’re calling it AI contamination. As content created by large language models (LLMs) seeps across domains like an oil spill, it will likely have two outcomes. PREMIUM Is Hagrid Played By a Robot?: An AI-generated story on the AI-controlled website The Enlightened Mindset. The article contains made-up quotes attributed to real people.
In the first, it will become more difficult to tell truth from fabrication, and this will hasten the enshittification or drop in quality of the information provided by the internet.
The second outcome will be a clearing of the skies, somewhat, as walled gardens of protected content form, open to users in premium, freemium and other subscription models.
News-website paywalls and YouTube Premium are early examples. But across vast swathes of the internet, the contamination is in free flow.
“Welcome to the world’s first fully AI-generated website!” reads the disclaimer on the landing page of The Enlightened Mindset.
The website offers no ownership details or contact information but lists hundreds of articles, by “contributors” with names such as Happy Sharer and Crazy Lee. Titles include “Is Hagrid Played By a Robot? An Exploration of the Possibility”, “How to Be More Ladylike: Speak Softly, Dress Modestly, Carry Yourself with Grace” and “How to Be Dangerous: Learn Self-Defense, Carry a Concealed Weapon, and Build a Network”.
The stories contain made-up quotes attributed to real people. The Hagrid story contains one from “a Dr Reuben Binns, professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge” on the drawbacks of casting a robot as Hagrid. In the real world, Binns is an associate professor of human-centered computing at the University of Oxford.
The number of platforms using such approaches is growing, and most offer no disclaimer.
Lying in wait
Earlier this month, NewsGuard, which tracks misinformation by assigning trust scores and ratings to online news sources, identified more than 700 AI-generated news and information websites that were operating with little to no human oversight, and no disclosures about the nature of their content.
New websites are steadily added to the list, in a valiant ongoing effort that will likely only ever skim the surface. When NewGuard launched its AI Tracking Centre in May, with a team of content analysts working to identify and flag such content, 49 such websites were identified in the first month.
The platforms carry fabricated reports about political leaders, spread false claims about celebrity deaths. In November, one such site, GlobalVillageSpace.com, announced that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist had died by suicide (the article was later tagged as satire).
In April, news platforms around the world reported the death of a Canadian actor named Saint Von Colucci, who had reportedly undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries in order to look like Jimin from the K-pop band BTS, and died from complications. Colucci didn’t exist; all images of him were AI-generated.
Al Jazeera called it the “first known case of AI being used to trick media outlets en masse… heralding the dawn of a new era of computer-generated fake news.”
As the number of such websites booms, credible sources such as trusted media brands will scramble to put together digital forensics teams trained to fight the misinformation they generate, says technology industry analyst Kashyap Kompella. “Fact-checking tools driven by AI will be built into browsers of the future as well. It will be the good vs evil fight trope we often see in science fiction, with AI on both sides of the battle.”
Zombie websites, phantom products
Watch those domain names carefully. Old ones are creeping back to life. The Hairpin, a women’s website that shut in 2018, is among those recently reanimated and populated with AI-generated content. Headlines here include absurdities such as “Celebrities All Have Little Real Teeth Under Their Big Fake Teeth”.
This version of Hairpin is run by Serbian DJ-turned-entrepreneur Nebojša Vujinović Vujo, who has reclaimed a number of abandoned news domains and flooded them with LLM-generated clickbait.
“In many cases, the revenue model for these websites is programmatic advertising under which the ad-tech industry delivers ads without regard to the nature or quality of the website,” NewsGuard said in a statement. “Unless brands take steps to exclude untrustworthy sites, their ads will continue to appear on these types of sites, creating an economic incentive for their creation at scale.”
Meanwhile, in January, Amazon’s unnamed generative AI feature, launched in September to help simplify how sellers list and describe products, began to misfire. Users ended up feeding AI-generated text into the program, the Amazon program failed to weed it out. As a result, products that ranged from lawn chairs to sets of drawers showed up in Amazon search results with names that were essentially AI error messages. “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfil this request it goes against OpenAI use policy,” one product name stated.
The error messages were an early glitch, and the listings were deleted. But they offer an indicator of what the online world could look like, amid a switch from human-generated clickbait to content aimed at hits and ads, but generated with no human involvement or oversight.
“The enshittification of the internet has become so widespread that the term was declared the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in 2023,” Kompella points out. (The term was coined in November 2022, by internet activist Cory Doctorow.)
As AI programs learn from AI content, this decline will intensify, Kompella adds.
Google-killers

The business of online advertising faces a significant shift too, as search engines move from the listings approach that drives traffic to websites, to a summary approach that promotes the engine’s own AI program.This will likely spark new kinds of tussles.
Google began monetising summary search results in January, for instance, by displaying ads within them, but other platforms are already doing the summaries better. Where the search giant only sometimes responds with a summary, Perplexity AI responds to every query with an in-depth note that contains links to multiple sources. Consensus does the same for scientific papers. And the Browse for Me feature in the privacy-focused Arc browser’s Arc Search presents a customised web page with information and related links, while blocking ads and trackers.
“These are like personal research assistants, streamlining and personalising every response,” says Kompella. “They are game-changers if one is looking for an in-depth, qualitative analysis-driven response.”
These search services will come at a cost to the content creator — we can expect to soon see copyright- and legislation-linked tussles over what constitutes fair use by such engines — and it could come at a cost to the user, Kompella says.
“It is likely that the internet of the future will be a space of walled gardens,” he adds. “As auto-generated content increases, the hand-crafted content will become more valued and premium material will increasingly be available, and perhaps visible, only to paying subscribers.”
IN NUMBERS: Bigger. Better? A look at our online lives
The average user spends about 40% of their waking hours on the internet, according to DataReportal.com. Every minute, 6.3 million searches are conducted worldwide on Google, and 6,944 prompts are fed into ChatGPT. Take a look at other dramatic findings drawn from the 2023 reports of reference library DataReportal.com, research agency Statista and the cloud solutions company Domo.
*Between 2013 and 2023, the number of internet users around the world nearly doubled, with the number of user profiles growing from 2.7 billion to 5.3 billion.
* India has 751.5 million internet users, as of January, an internet penetration rate of 52.4%.
* Among the most online countries in the world are Norway and Denmark, with 99% internet penetration. Meanwhile, millions remain offline in countries such as North Korea, where reported internet penetration is the lowest in the world, at less than 10%.
* The average user spends 6.5 hours actively online each day, or about 40% of their waking lives. Seeking information, keeping in touch with loved ones and leisure / entertainment account for most of the time spent online, found a 2023 survey by market research company GlobalWebIndex, cited by DataReportal.
* A typical social-media user now spends 2 hours and 23 minutes a day on these platforms — or more than a third of total online time.
* The number of Google searches conducted worldwide is soaring. There were 500,000 queries a day in 1999, 2 million queries a minute in 2013, 5.9 million a minute in 2022, and 6.3 million a minute in 2023.
* ChatGPT currently holds the record for fastest-growing consumer application in history. It had about 13 million unique visitors a day in January 2023, two months after its launch. That figure rose to 100 million monthly active users that month. In November 2023, CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT had reached 100 million weekly active users.
* Digital ad spend has more than doubled in five years, from $331 billion in 2018 to $720 billion in 2023. The bulk of this expenditure now goes towards programmatic advertising, a format that customises the stream of ads for each user, based on data that has been harvested about their online activity, browsing history, spending habits and other such parameters.