Prologue: When a New Predator Enters the Savanna Imagine the African savanna. Now drop in a new apex predator - not just a faster lion, but something unnatural: it runs faster than a cheetah, sees sharper than an eagle, never sleeps, and has no empathy. What happens to the ecosystem? Slow herbivores vanish first, mid-level predators starve. The entire food chain realigns around this unstoppable force. That’s what's happening online right now. AI in the form of assistants and chatbots is the new apex predator, reshaping the digital savanna to serve its needs. But instead of antelopes and hyenas, it’s news sites and content aggregators going extinct. In place of a rich web of knowledge, we’re left with a desert of entertainment. The Real Resource War: Attention Every ecosystem has a limited resource - in nature, it’s food and water. On the internet, it’s your attention. your attention Before AI, the flow looked like this: You search → Google gives links → Websites compete → You click, compare, read, think. You search → Google gives links → Websites compete → You click, compare, read, think. It was a complex web of interaction a multi-step information food chain. Now? You ask → AI answers. You ask → AI answers. That’s it - no detours, no middlemen. The entire ecosystem gets bypassed. The First Casualties: Who's Already Dying Wikipedia: A Giant on Clay Feet Wikipedia: A Giant on Clay Feet When was the last time you actually visited Wikipedia? It used to be the crown jewel of open knowledge - a collective effort by millions of volunteers. But why bother clicking a link when GPT can summarize any article instantly, even tailored to your reading level? Yes, AI sometimes gets facts wrong. It invents sources, it oversimplifies. But most people won’t care enough to check. Wikipedia’s traffic has dropped 23% in just three years. In March 2025, chatGPT.com had 500 million more visits than Wikipedia. Why write for a site no one visits anymore? AI drains knowledge from Wikipedia, but gives nothing back. 23% in just three years chatGPT.com 500 million It's slowly becoming a zombie - technically alive, but bleeding out. Expert Forums: The Death of Knowledge Communities Expert Forums: The Death of Knowledge Communities Stack Overflow. Medical forums. Niche communities where specialists once debated nuance - all are fading. In April 2025, questions and answers on Stack Overflow dropped by 64% year-over-year. questions and answers on Stack Overflow dropped by 64% Why wade through old threads when AI gives you a ready-made solution in one sentence? This has led to what you might call vibe-coding - developers pasting AI-generated code they don’t understand. When it breaks, no one knows why. vibe-coding Experts have no one to pass the torch to. Beginners don't ask people anymore, they ask machines. Ironically, the same forums that trained AI are now being smothered by it. News Sites: Next in the Firing Line News Sites: Next in the Firing Line News organizations are already struggling. AI can now summarize stories from dozens of outlets in seconds. What happens when it can do that in real-time? in real-time News sites risk becoming suppliers for AI brands that repackage their work. Investigative journalism, analysis, even interviews. AI can already mimic most of it. Only high-profile exclusives survive, and even those are a niche. No wonder media giants are suing AI companies. They see the writing on the wall - they’re not partners, they’re data farms. The Survivors: Who's Adapting to the New Ecosystem TikTok & YouTube: The Kings of Emotion TikTok & YouTube: The Kings of Emotion Entertainment platforms are thriving - not because they resist AI, but because they’ve integrated it. Their currency isn’t knowledge, it’s emotion: humor, surprise, curiosity. AI still struggles to make a perfect viral cat video or a travel vlog with soul. That’s changing, but for now, humans still have the edge. emotion Reddit & Niche Communities: The Last Human Touch Reddit & Niche Communities: The Last Human Touch Some platforms survive because they deliver what AI can't (yet): genuine human interaction. genuine human interaction Reddit and forums - people go there to argue, share memes, and feel connected. Sure, AI can answer "how to fix a leaky tap," but it can’t replicate the joy of an unexpected joke or a dumb, passionate debate. But even here, a shadow looms - what happens when bots flood the comments, writing memes and arguments indistinguishable from human ones? Specialized Services: Real-World Relevance Specialized Services: Real-World Relevance Sites that offer real-world interaction - banks, shops, booking systems are holding on. You can’t yet buy groceries or register your car directly through GPT. But that gap is closing. AI bots are already handling bookings, insurance, classified ads and I have been contributing to it by developing the AISO bot product directly Premium Knowledge: The Digital Safe Zones Premium Knowledge: The Digital Safe Zones A new elite is forming: gated knowledge communities. Private Slack groups. Paid masterclasses. Closed forums where experts share knowledge away from the reach of AI crawlers. Think $500 courses instead of free YouTube tutorials. Knowledge becomes a commodity again hidden behind NDAs and paywalls. The bitter irony? The internet was supposed to democratize information. Now it’s feudal again - with digital monasteries for the few. A Quiet Coup: Who Controls What You Know The Algorithm Decides What’s "True" The Algorithm Decides What’s "True" In the old web, you could compare sources. Now, AI decides what's "reputable." It ranks truth, it decides which voices count. Who says The New York Times matters more than an independent journalist? Who prioritizes Harvard over someone with 20 years of field experience? This is algorithmic censorship not by silencing, but by sorting. And it gets worse: AI strips away context - medical advice loses disclaimer; legal tips lose nuance; scientific findings lose limitations. Advertising: A Shattered Economy Advertising: A Shattered Economy The entire web economy runs on ads but if no one visits websites, who sees them? AI’s answers leave no room for banners. No clicks. No pageviews. Google’s already injecting ads into Bard’s answers. ChatGPT is testing sponsored content. Soon, only the AI companies will own the user's attention and the revenue. When AI becomes the browser, the assistant, the writer, the translator, the search engine, the editor - it also becomes the gatekeeper to the digital world. The Self-Destruction Paradox Here’s the catch: AI is destroying the very sources it was trained on. It’s like a predator that’s eaten all the prey and now it’s starving. Imagine the internet in 2035: Wikipedia: abandoned Forums: dead News: AI-written Blogs: ghostwritten by bots Comments: synthetic, autogenerated Wikipedia: abandoned Forums: dead News: AI-written Blogs: ghostwritten by bots Comments: synthetic, autogenerated What will train the next generation of AI? Old AI content? We’ll enter a feedback loop - a digital inbreeding where AI copies itself endlessly. No originality. No surprises. No weird metaphors, emotional tangents, or accidental brilliance. digital inbreeding Just bland, templated content. Google’s already drowning in AI spam. Most of it looks good on the surface but it’s hollow. The web becomes a bog of beautifully written nothingness. From Library to Theme Park So what are we left with? The internet is shifting from a global library to a giant amusement park. global library giant amusement park It was never perfect, it had clickbait, SEO scammers, porn, trolls, and madness. But it was diverse. It had corners. You could stumble into weird, wonderful places things not made for everyone, but just for you. diverse corners you Soon, those places may vanish. Your companions online might start sounding a lot like bots. You’ll visit less. Until one day, your vast internet becomes a single, polished, comforting window - a chatbot. Epilogue: What Now? Is this inevitable? Maybe not. But we need to recognize what we’re losing: the value of reading original sources, comparing views, forming our own opinions. The beauty of subjectivity, of human error, of imperfection. Maybe we need to preserve the “old web” the messy, chaotic, human side. Maybe regulation will force AI to cite its sources, or governments will tax it to support the content creators it feeds on. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll accept this new world where knowledge is monopolized, entertainment algorithmized, and curiosity satisfied by a single interface. After all, what happens to a species that no longer hunts, that has food delivered, always pre-chewed? It doesn’t die - it just becomes domesticated. domesticated
