All your content are belong to AI
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days. It’s even sucking the last drops of blod out of the wasteland that is this blog. How arrogant of me to believe I was writing content for humans, when in fact, a battalion of AI bots are my only constant readers.
Zero Wing - The epic game behind the meme “All your base are belong to us”.
Consuming your content in real-time
I was not aware to what extent OpenAI is changing how people access and consume information on the Internet. One of ChatGPT’s most impressive features is its ability to search the Internet in real-time to answer user queries.
It’s kind of like Google Gemini’s AI overview response to user queries, only actually useful. In my opinion, ChatGPT does such an impressive job with filtering, organizing, and summarizing the relevant parts from its sources that the user would hardly ever need to leave its service (eat your heart out, Google).
ChatGPT-User feeding on my organic content in real-time. Click the image for details.
The article referenced in the image above is requested by bots more than 90% of the time. Human traffic is going extinct. That is more or less the trend for all of my content.
ChatGPT-o3 is providing me with the information I asked for after searching the web.
ChatGPT does provide the user with source links, but seeing how it excels at identifying the information you need, there is hardly any reason to read the extra fluff provided with the source material.
At least, my numbers seem to support this claim. During the last week, my web server log has received 2210 hits from the ChatGPT-User/1.0 user agent, while I’ve gotten 4 hits containing the utm_source=chatgpt.com referrer. The latter indicates that a human has clicked a source link provided by ChatGPT.
It’s evolution, baby
All my own content is licensed under WTFPL, so I don’t personally have any issues with what OpenAI is doing. However, disregarding copyright and charging its users for other people’s work seems both unjust and unsustainable in the long term. Creators making a living off their content face a far bigger threat today than Google ever posed.
I should probably disclose that I am a paying user of OpenAI’s services. In that regard, I am aware that I am a part of the problem. But it’s a problem where I don’t see a solution. Search engines no longer provide relevant search results and have been gamed into a premature death by SEO. The web itself has become infested with ads and malware while any organic content seems to be written for search engines.
OpenAI currently provides me with a better experience, so unfortunately, that’s what I’ll use. That, and my extensive list of RSS feeds.
