Matthew Prince, the billionaire chief executive of the $80 billion cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, paints a dark picture of the internet in the not-too-distant future.
It goes something like this: artificial intelligence (AI) “answer engines” such as ChatGPT replace search as the primary entry point of the web. The shift starves a suffering media ecosystem of vital traffic and ad revenue, because chatbots mine the web to answer questions, but don’t send users links, and the business model that underlies the web collapses. Referral traffic plunges. Publishers shut down.
“We go back to the time of the 1400s, of the Medicis, when there are five powerful families that hire all the journalists, all the academics, all the researchers. In order to do this sort of work, you have to work for one of these big five families. But they won’t be families; they’ll be the big five AI companies.
“There’ll be a liberal one, a conservative one, a Chinese one, probably an Indian one,” he explained. “But is it that hard to imagine?”
Of course, the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and Google would still need the raw material — the content — so they hire their own journalists. “You can see Sam Altman saying, ‘Look, we need the data. Everybody’s shutting down their bureaux, so we’re just going to stand up our own version of the Associated Press.’ It would cost, like, 0.1 per cent of their GPU [chip] budget to do it.
“Now, all of a sudden, if you want to know what’s going on in Karachi, the only place you can go is ChatGPT. That’s a really bad outcome.”
OpenAI, which has agreed a multi-year licensing deal with News Corp, the parent company of this newspaper, has been sued by numerous artists and publishers, including The New York Times, for the alleged purloining of content.
Meta, which used millions of books to train its AI models, is also being pursued in the courts. Last week, a San Francisco judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and the authors of nearly 500,000 books that were illegally downloaded to train its Claude chatbot. The company will pay $3,000 per title as recompense.
And yet a sustainable model that ensures publishers and media companies can earn enough to operate in this new world remains elusive. Prince, whose company polices traffic for about 20 per cent of the web, has a solution.
In July, Cloudflare put up digital firewalls around clients’ sites, blocking AI “crawlers” that copy content. It is then up to companies to choose whether they want AI companies to pilfer their sites, or put a tollbooth in front of their content.
Prince’s hope is that if enough say “no”, it will force the AI companies to the table to work out a fee structure.
“The deal with Google was always that they got the content free but they sent you traffic. AI companies don’t, so they shouldn’t get the content free.”
Last week, Prince launched NET Dollar, a digital currency, to ease the way for billions of micro-transactions as chatbots crawl the web and, potentially, pay every time they access a site.
AI is changing the way people use the web. The Daily Mail said this year that when Google offers an AI summary at the top of its search results, click-through rates to its site are cut in half. Google claims the traffic from those results is “higher quality”.
Cloudflare started to hear about these shifts two years ago, not long after ChatGPT began. “Media companies were coming to us saying, ‘Our businesses are getting killed by a new type of threat: AI companies’.”
Cloudflare found that going back ten years, for every two pages that Google crawled, it would send back one visitor. Today, 20 pages are crawled for every visitor sent: it is now ten times harder to get traffic. Google called “crawls to visitors” a “flawed metric.” It said: “We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day and believe that Search’s value exchange with the web remains strong.”
It is more extreme with AI companies. ChatGPT scans 750 pages for every visitor it sends to a site, Prince said, while Anthropic scans 30,000 pages per referral.
“We don’t recognise these figures,” OpenAI said. “Chat- GPT search connects people with original, high-quality content from the web and makes it part of their conversation. By integrating search with a chat interface, users can engage with information in a new way while content owners gain new opportunities to reach a broader audience.”
Media armageddon is not assured. Consider music. The streaming revolution started with an explosion of piracy in 1999 when Napster made it possible to download music free. The tumult sent the music labels into a financial tailspin. Eventually the Spotify model emerged, where every time a song is played, an artist gets paid.
Prince’s hope is that the AI and media companies can strike a bargain that serves both. “In the future, it’s actually going to be the hyper-local, really specific, unique content, which is going to be the stuff that is the most rewarded,” he said.
“I predict that there will be more money going into content creation five years from now than today, and that we will more than replace the lost ad and subscription revenue with the revenue that comes off the back of the fees from the AI companies.”
No comments:
Post a Comment