Comment by c4wrd

You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs. In many cases, a goal someone may have is that if they publish content on the internet, they will attract people to return for more of the content they produce. Google acted as a broker, helping facilitate interactions between producers and consumers. Consumers would supply a query they want an answer to, and a producer would provide an answer or facilitate a space for the answers to be found (in the recent era, replace answer with product or store-front).

There was a mostly healthy interaction between the producers and consumers (I won't die on this hill; I understand the challenges of SEO optimization and an advertisement-laden internet). With AI, Google is taking on the roles of both broker and provider. It aims to collect everyone's data and use it as its own authoritative answer without any attribution to the source (or traffic back to the original source at all!).

In this new model, I am not incentivized to produce content on the internet, I am incentivized to simply sell my data to Google (or other centralized AI company) and that's it.

A clearer picture to help you understand what's going on: the internet of the past few decades was a bazaar marketplace. Every corner featured different shops with distinct artistic styles, showcasing a great deal of diversity. It was teeming with life. If you managed your storefront well, people would come back and you could grow. In this new era, we are moving to a centralized, top-down enterprise. Diversity of content and so many other important attributes (ethos, innovation, aestheticism) go out of the window.