Get the latest tech news

It's the End of the Web as We Know It

A great public resource is at risk of being destroyed.

In response, a multibillion-dollar industry—search-engine optimization, or SEO—has emerged to cater to Google’s shifting preferences, strategizing new ways for websites to rank higher on search-results pages and thus attain more traffic and lucrative ad impressions. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human. We’ve already noticed a huge increase in online pollution: garbage content featuring AI-generated pages of regurgitated word salad, with just enough semblance of coherence to mislead and waste readers’ time.

Get the Android app