The “frightening” forecasts of the CEO of Cloudflare on the way in which the AI ​​will ruin internet

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the last technological director to sound the warning bells for a short -term dystopian AI scenario.

Addressing the Big Interview Podcast of Wired on Tuesday, Prince said that he thought that the days of search engines being “the dominant interface of the web” have been over for a long time.

“Now, if you are doing a search, it makes you an answer at the top of the page. This does not give you a Treasury card. Instead, it provides you with what they call an AI preview, which has taken a lot of content, broke it together, summed it up in various ways and synthesized it,” said Prince.

He is not the only person who sounds the bells of the day of the day for internet research. Earlier this month, a federal judge pronounced a surprising verdict in an antitrust trial on the monopoly of Google’s search engine, when he left the technology giant keeping his search engine, Chrome. His reasoning was that he thought that the generating AI finally presented “a significant challenge to the domination of the Google market” in internet research.

AI is not a search engine, says Prince, but an “response engine”, and it cannot generate traffic, which maintains internet content creators such as researchers, writers, journalists and more paid.

While the response engines continue to take over from search engines, Prince thinks that we are looking at three possible future.

It is unlikely that the first future he thinks of happening: journalism, academic research, etc., will die completely and will be taken up by AI. Basically, the “theory of the dead on the Internet”, according to which a large part of the online content is created and interacted by via boots, a strategy of generation of income from the end of the natural end of the final state from online content.

But AI is nourished by the content written by humans; It does not generate it freshly, so it seems quite improbable, he thinks.

The second possibility, however, is “very likely to occur,” says Prince. He calls it the “possibility of the black mirror”.

In this scenario, he thinks that each content creator, from journalists to researchers, will be employed by a handful of AI companies in a system that will resemble the 1400s, when artists, thinkers and writers have all been patronized by a handful of powerful families such as the Medici family of Florence, in Italy. The Medici were a powerful family who financed the work of many artists and thinkers, but also strengthened their political power by controlling the production of information and ensuring that it promoted their own ideologies.

If this scenario takes place, Prince thinks that IA companies like Anthropic, Perplexity and Sam Altman Openai will start to hire the population of more and more unemployed journalists and other content creators to set up or content offices.

If it becomes our reality, which the global information system will be found with a handful of large technological companies that control knowledge and will probably settle it on their beliefs. Again, not too crazy about an idea: only two months ago, Grok de Xai made the headlines when the researchers discovered that the chatbot checked its owner, Elon Musk, opinions before answering sensitive questions.

“There will be a curator, and there will be a liberal, and there will be a Chinese, and there will be one Indian,” said Prince.

This factor on the ideological lines is directly in contradiction with the initial goal of the Internet to be a place where people can share and access without limits, just knowledge that flows towards and from anywhere. If people are starting to subscribe to a handful of large AI companies to read their perspectives on the world, the information will become “compartmentalized”, says Prince, because the Internet loses its role as “great information equalizer, democnerian”.

A third possibility

There is a brighter third possibility, and it is the one for which Prince and his Cloudflare company are fighting.

Currently, the content is free for AI. But Prince thinks it is about to change. He predicts that IA companies in the future will look more like Netflix, aka a company that obliges the content of creators to offer its users a content library.

The content turns out to be the next Battle of AI. During one of the many hearings of the Google antitrust trial, the main vice-president of Apple services, Eddy Cue, was asked what it would take to choose another competitor rather than Google as default search engine for the Safari browser. Cue said that no existing search engine could dethrone Google, but a genetive AI could on a single condition: the technology is good, which must evolve more is the generative AI search index, AKA the data available for recovery.

To make this possibility a reality, Prince thinks that content creators first need to create a rarity by preventing AI grayfactors from accessing the content without paying it. A growing list of publishers and press organizations has already pursued various AI companies for the drop in profits due to the rupture of the AI ​​of their content without compensation. On Friday, the most recent addition was that MEDIA Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, continued Google on its overall view of the AI ​​in research.

Cloudflare pulled his first ball in this war of rarity this summer when he began to allow customers to block AI gear robots to scratch their websites, unless the managers of bots pay the creators of the data they consume. Companies like Associated Press and Conde Nast are already customers

“This is an existential threat to us. If the Internet ceases to exist, what remains for Cloudflare to do? So, one of the things that is really important for us is a prosperous and dynamic Internet ecosystem,” Prince said.

The third possibility seems better than the previous two (at least for me, a journalist colleague), but she houses many questions. Google has completely changed the functioning of knowledge industries by crowning commitment as king, sometimes to the detriment of the quality of this information. What will be the operational philosophy of this new era of information, where press organizations are starting to act as wire services for AI chatbots?