When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I could feel the noose tightening on my industry. Artificial intelligence—specifically, large language models (LLMs)—were coming for my lunch.
I’ve worked in online publishing since 2012, first as a managing editor at a large Silicon Valley company and now as the chief content officer for Sechel Ventures, an exceptional boutique publisher.
Our company’s portfolio includes 12 websites, covering graduate programs in health, business, and engineering. I’ve interviewed congressmen, CEOs, venture capitalists, engineers, financial experts, world-renowned researchers, and faculty members across many disciplines. My day-to-day consists of writing, editing, and some site design, always with an eye toward presenting the most useful guides to common questions about higher education and careers. Most of our work includes the firsthand perspective of a professor or professional to help prospective students get the information they need. Many of my writers hold at least master’s degrees, and my company has always operated in good faith, assuming that the hard work of information-gathering and analysis would be rewarded by the search engines.
And then, the titans of tech designed their LLMs to swallow the ocean of the internet. Every article I’ve painstakingly written or edited has been vacuumed up and regurgitated to folks who used to be our readers. While many of these tools are free now, the Goliaths of AI intend to sell us back our own research, writing, and inventions under the sanctimonious banner of technological progress.
Sure, ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, Grok, Claude, and the rest might throw up a link to one of my articles, but the click-through rates are abysmal. In a recent Pew survey, only 1 percent of Google users presented with an AI summary clicked a source link. People rarely go deeper than the surface-level response, which captures virtually all of the inquiry’s traffic. And without traffic to a publisher, it begins to die, regardless of how accurate or useful the article is.
Although the outright theft of our work is the biggest problem, there’s another issue: people’s shrinking attention spans are upending the way we consume and produce information. Folks don’t read as much as they used to; high schoolers are struggling to finish books, as many use AI to generate their assignments; and even elite film students are struggling to sit through iconic old movies because they’re “too long.”
It’s simply easier to passively consume shiny, dynamic content than it is to read. I’m reminded of that famous Edward O. Wilson quote: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Our animal brains are struggling to process our own informational omnipotence.
This proclivity for what’s simple and superficial is evident in what’s popular online. I’ve gone viral twice—and neither was strictly on the merits of my writing or ideas. The first time was for (what continues to be) my most popular Blore’s Razor post, entitled “My Favorite Porn Star is a Philanthropist.” It has around 8,000 unique views and gets hits daily.
The second time was earlier this year, when I was randomly interviewed in Guadalajara by a hot influencer named Jesús. That video has garnered hundreds of thousands of views and 73,000+ likes. I’m not even on TikTok, but a group of Latino men continues to cross platforms and reach out to me on Instagram. (I’ve nearly doubled my IG followers since last month.)
Why read a lengthy piece when a clever host or an attractive influencer can summarize the important bits for you? I’m guilty of this. I’d rather watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver than read The New York Times. (Frankly, I’m impressed you’ve made it this far in my post. Well done.)
Journalism has been grappling with a related issue for decades now: the cheapening of information. Search engines and social media platforms made consumers less likely to pay for the hard work of news-gathering. We gravitate toward videos, short concept summaries, and the infinitely customizable buffet of facts we can order from AI. People expect information to be free and accessible, while Google, Meta, and the rest steadily increased their advertising profits.
As you probably have noticed, Google Search has become absolute garbage. According to Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification, tech companies typically have three stages:
- They start by attracting consumers with a useful service.
- They then degrade the user experience to serve their advertisers best.
- Then they become worse for both customers and advertisers to maximize value for their shareholders.
Google’s primary goal is no longer to connect you with the most useful information, but rather with that which will make it the most money. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and especially X have also become deeply enshittified.
When the quality of a product declines and there are no real competitors to turn to, consumers get trapped, ripped off, and stolen from. And of course, the Trump administration is too busy with its own corruption to pursue any robust anti-trust cases.
Now imagine this enshittification on the steroids of AI. For ChatGPT and the others, we’re still in Doctorow’s first phase—utility for consumers—but the primacy of advertisers’ interests will reign shortly in phase two.
The titans of tech fancy themselves to be geniuses—and they have talents, sure—but above all, they are cutthroat capitalists. Their appetites have grown too large for us to continue bearing their weight. Their wealth was never meant to trickle down from their island compounds and armored vehicles. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Altman aren’t engineers—they are rapacious, take-no-prisoners businessmen, who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Let’s not forget that they have all kissed the ring of an accused child rapist, debasing themselves to make their companies richer.
While AI companies steal from me and from you and from everyone you know, we’re distracted by our own petty conflicts. At what point will enough Americans realize that their quarrel isn’t with their neighbor—men vs women, conservative vs liberal, white vs Black, non-immigrant vs immigrant, Christian vs non-Christian, straight vs LGBTQ+? The real fight is between the obscenely rich who evade taxes and the majority of us. It’s always been top vs bottom.
Most of the rest of the world knows this, but the US has been deferring a class conflict forever. This is why the tech leaders are buying islands and building bunkers. These are contingency plans for when our American rage boils over. People with grotesque amounts of money are in trouble if we experience an economic awakening.
The wealth gap wasn’t inevitable, and rich men today still could make a different decision: just look at Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. In the recent book Dirtbag Billionaire, author David Gelles covers how Chouinard pioneered a new type of corporate entity: in short, Patagonia’s profits go to a trust that protects land and combats global warming. Rather than indulging in tacky hedonism (Bezos) or self-promoting philanthropy (Zuckerberg), the Chouinard family decided to do something different.
I also applaud billionaire MacKenzie Scott for her quiet activism, giving $26 billion in no-strings-attached funds to non-profits and organizations. That is a human being, right there: her ex-husband’s yachts and plastic bride seem so small and sad by comparison.
We are all grist for the mill of a few oversized egos—and we’re just getting started. The haves and have-nots are soaring higher or sinking deeper into their respective camps. The billionaires may one day yearn for the soft touch of a Bernie, Mamdani, or AOC if a more militant activist takes the helm.
One thing is clear: AI won’t unfuck the future—people will. The titans of tech best remember that.