Something for the weekend – why the Web is dead in Artificial Intelligence's coup on the world's digitized content

Google's AI Mode was launched to millions more users this week. Alas, it is just part of the real endgame: a global coup on the world's digitized content.

Here's how it works: wall off our data, including our copyrighted work, within AI search. Stop referring users out to verified sources of information, many of which will now wither and die as those walls are erected around our low-hanging fruit – the IP in our books, research papers, analyses, movies, scripts, art, designs, inventions, and music. Instead, trap users in a bubble of scraped, uncredited, unlicensed data, plus Large Language Models' (LLMs) hallucinations and misinformation.

It is the logical endpoint of an AI model that is all about industrialized copyright theft and data laundering. Giant organizations own all our data by default and rent it back to us in the guise of chatbots that pretend to be our friends ...