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I won't claim that it won't happen, but to paint such prophecies you have to have quite a specific idea of the "internet", and I'm not even sure I can clearly imagine what is it for you. Internet is a communication system. WhatsApp is internet. Will messaging your mom become irrelevant because you can just as ChatGPT? Well, maybe, but I don't see it happen in the near future. Okay, I see, you meant to say "world wide web", stuff you access in your browser, yeah… This doesn't really help either, because you access all sorts of stuff using your browser, it's just a lousy set of wrappers to render whatever there is, including WhatsApp. So, okay, what do people do on the internet besides WhatsApp? They watch Twitch, for instance. Why? Are they looking for answers there? Surely not, generally it's such a mindbogglingly useless stupid waste of time it's hard to believe people actually watch this shit, yet they do, a lot, and even donate money like they are grateful their useless time is uselessly wasted. Also, it's a well-known fact they aren't even looking for a specific kind of content: if you are a streamer with 10K online you can do basically whatever you want, these people are following you, not whatever it is you did when they joined your channel. So, will people stop watching real people, because there are, well, rendered people? I'd say it's unlikely in the foreseeable future. For the same reasons it's unlikely that people won't visit 4chan and HN anymore, all sorts of thematic forums and such. Obviously, they won't stop accessing online libraries, because when you want to read Kafka, you want to read Kafka and not a ChatGPT-generated summary of Kafka. Same with watching LoTR (even though it can be completely generated by NN, the movie has to have a name and you want to know that it's the same stuff your friend, "friend" or the favourite twitch-streamers of yours recommends, not some custom-generated movie, tailored specially for you). Same with every blogger, podcaster, youtuber. You may like recommendation systems, but it doesn't really diminish the role of trusted opinions for majority of people so far. So, what else is there on the internet? Shitty information portals with copywriter-generated articles? Well, ok, now it will be ChatGPT-generated articles. So what? I suppose it may turn out to be actually better than human copywriters. Maybe Wikipedia will be less relevant (but it wouldn't, if it was better structured, and the main (even though it's false) claim of Wikipedia is that it doesn't generate original content anyway). Surely a lot of things will look quite different 30 years forward. But it's hard to predict how exactly they will look, and I'm pretty sure it won't be whatever you imagine right now. |