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We have Tim Berners-Lee to thank for the World Wide Web. But these days, the British computer scientist’s creation is in peril, thanks to the rise of generative A.I. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly produce information sourced from across the internet, fewer people are visiting websites for that source content—an evolution that could cause the web’s ad-based business model to “fall apart,” according to Berners-Lee.
“If the LLM is reading it and the human is not reading it, then we have a problem with the business,” said Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, while speaking at the FT Future of AI Summit yesterday (Nov. 5). “We need to replace it with something else.”
A shift toward A.I.-generated summaries is already underway as companies like Google integrate A.I. across their search engines. The share of internet users likely to click on traditional search results is cut in half when a Google AI Overview summary is offered, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, which also found that just 1 percent of surveyed users visit the links cited within those summaries.
Revamping the internet’s business model isn’t necessarily a bad thing, said Berners-Lee, who pointed out that some users have become “fed up” with the ad-based model. Ads that are overly personalized can especially drive people “crazy” and make them feel like they’re being surveilled, he added.
Despite A.I. posing a threat to the web’s current economic foundation, Berners-Lee isn’t opposed to the technology. In fact, he’s the co-founder of an A.I. startup himself: Inrupt, which is developing a chatbot called Charlie. The bot draws on personal data to deliver customized responses while allowing users to control which platforms can access their information.
Still, Berners-Lee warned that A.I.’s rise could have serious consequences for the quality of information people rely on. The technology is “frightful in the sense that so much of our sort of life on the web is based on people reading pages one way or another, and that piece is taken out of the mix,” he said. “If people just use A.I., will people not be reading blogs?”
He’s concerned that users might accept LLM outputs at face value and skip fact-checking through sites like Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia has already seen an 8 percent drop in human visitors this year, which it attributes to users obtaining answers from A.I.-powered search engines instead.
Fewer human visitors to websites could also mean less new information being written—posing a long-term risk to LLMs themselves, which need fresh data to train on. One possible outcome, Berners-Lee suggested, is that A.I. systems could eventually generate their own material. “Maybe you’ll end up with a society in which LLMs perform the role of authors as well as readers,” he said.
Such a future isn’t as dystopian as it might sound, the Web’s creator added. “There’s an assumption that A.I. generated stuff is sort of hogwash,” said Berners Lee. “But there will be good A.I. stuff as well.”
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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
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