Why It's Unlikely That LLM Slop Will Dominate the Web in the Long Run
Many sites will go up in smoke
We have only just mentioned what happened to BetaNews this month. From an actual (even if biased) news site it turned into clickbait. Then it became LLM slop and paid placements (fake articles disguised as news, for a sponsor). Then it became fake news and a slopfarm (all 'articles' published since getting rid of the staff are deemed to be slop).
Hours ago we saw another press report about remaining sites or news organisations seeing a sharp drop in search referrals due to LLM "summaries". We put that in IRC. It's true that a lot of sites rely on extensive news archives, which would only be found (perhaps more than 90% of the time) by searching the Web. Another issue, as we said a few times last week, is dependence on social control media. Many sites outsourced their "followers" to Twitter and other such sites instead of encouraging adoption of RSS (or similar means of direct syndication). We all know what happened to Twitter. It was inevitable. It is also said that many young people quit using Facebook and have moved on. Microsoft LinkedIn is stuck in a loop of layoffs. Social Control Media is, in general, not a substitute for RSS. It never was.
Many people who frequent YouTube found out that RSS became "hidden", Google's algorithms became more oppressive, and creators received less "views", not just less money. That was intentional. YouTube has financial problems. As for LLM "summaries" in Google search (a form of plagiarism, Google copying text without attribution or link), consider who makes excuses for it and why.
The eventual outcome might be a lack of incentive to produce, which in turn lowers the accuracy of LLMs. Our intuition tells us (Ryan said this the other day) that at the end fewer people will bother with search engines and instead people will start visiting sites they trust, avoiding the risk of landing on some random sites with LLM slop and slop images. That does not mean people won't use search, they might not use search engines like Yandex or Google. Those are susceptible to manipulation and gaming because sites compete for search traffic, even by SEO and LLMs. In due course it makes search queries less fruitful and LLM "summaries" cannot make up for that.
We can sort of envision change in browsing habits, wherein "web directories" and curation by humans plays a growing role. People are getting sick and tired of reading nonsense that's produced by LLMs. They will look for alternatives. Slopfarms will eventually perish (they have no actual value) and "survivors" on the Web will be sites that never depended on search engines and social control media. █