Go on Reddit, look around. You’ll see the same question asked over and over again, if you move in the same circles as me: 

• Is SEO dead? 
• Does AI content rank? 
• How do I make AI content look human? 

These are the wrong questions to be asking, if you care about what you do and the people (your audience) you serve. 

AI Slop Has Already Killed The Open Web, Most of Social Media & It’s Probably Too Late To Save It

No one seems to care about the open web as a concept or something that needs to be protected. 

Instead, most view it as something to be exploited for their own ends in any way that they can. 

To be clear, there’s always been spammers operating on the web. But LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have made spamming the web easier than ever. 

But the main problem right now is that the companies behind these LLMs, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, no longer operate in an ethical manner, either. 

They steal without attribution, scrape without respecting robots.txt files, and (in the case of Meta) illegally download copyrighted material to train their models. 

And after just three years of this nonsense, it would appear that what’s left of the open web is now all but ruined. 

Oxford researchers just confirmed what we feared:

The internet as we know it is dying.

AI content went from ~5% in 2020 to 48% by May 2025. Projections say 90%+ by next year.

Why? AI articles cost <$0.01. Human writers cost $10-100.

But the real crisis is model collapse. When AI trains on AI-generated content, quality degrades like photocopying a photocopy. Rare ideas disappear. Everything converges to generic sameness.

It’s recursive. Today’s AI slop becomes tomorrow’s training data, producing worse output, which becomes training data again.

Source

Big Tech Has Sold-Out The Open Web For Profit, And Google Is The Worst Offender 

Google is a monopoly. This isn’t even up for debate anymore, it’s a matter of record. 

It is also one of the most influential companies on the planet and, for a lot of people, billions of them, in fact, the main entry point to the open web. 

You’d think, given all of the above, and the fact its entire business model is contingent on people using search, that it would have done more to stop the enshitification of the web.

It didn’t. In fact, it did the exact opposite: it went all in on AI, both as a company and with its core product, search, with the rollout of its almost-universally-despised AI Overviews. 

It relaxed its stance on the use of AI content, it released tools that help people create fake podcasts, fake images, fake videos, and fake content. 

And guess what happened next? The internet started drowning in AI slop, and now the genie’s out of the bottle it is impossible to put it back.

The Ethical Problem With Training Data For LLMs

Worse still: Google trained its AI models on data scraped from the open web, from publishers large and small, and didn’t pay them a dime.

It just stole their content and then, for tens of millions of sites, shadow-banned them from its results pages with its Helpful Content Update (HCU). 

“Google needs to understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose,” Tim Giordano, one of the attorneys at Clarkson bringing the suit against Google, told CNN in an interview. “Our personal information and our data is our property, and it’s valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose.”

Source

The problem with AI right now, and how LLMs work in general, is that they’re built on unethical foundations. They’re not actually AI in the true sense of the word; they just throw together things from their training data – words, images, code, whatever. 

I’m simplifying how they work here, of course, but in a macro sense this is how models like Claude and ChatGPT operate in essence: they require a constant stream of new training data. 

And where does that training data come from? It’s mined from the open web. From creators and publishers, large and small. And most of them, nowadays, are not happy about getting the short-end of the stick which is why Google and OpenAI are involved in a never-ending series of lawsuits. 

You’ll Miss The Open Web When’s It Gone & Proper Information is Pay-Walled or Locked Inside Communities

Most big publications and publishers have gone (or will go) behind paywalls or subscription models because, well… how else are they going to protect their revenues and intellectual property, if companies like Google and OpenAI have no ethical grounding anymore? 

“Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content,” Patel wrote in a statement posted online.

Websites aren’t as cool as social media or YouTube, but what’s happening on the web is now leaking into these platforms too, so there really is no safe haven unless you go offline and just read books and magazines. 

The problem for Google (and, I’d argue, the rest of us too) is that once AI generated slop which, remember, is just plagiarised IP in the first place, becomes the main type of content on the web, there’ll be no more “training data” for these LLMs. 

And that’s when model collapse happens, when things get really bad.

Do you think spammers care about the quality of their content if it ranks? They don’t.

And that means, whatever happens, companies like Google and Meta will eventually have to step up and do something for publishers and creators. 

For creators, the focus going forward should be twofold: protect your audience (and IP) from Big Tech, work on building-out your email lists and communities, and become a zealot about the quality of the content you put out.

You don’t need to move faster, produce a thousand posts or updates a day. Quality is now the benchmark. Focus on that, and build meaningful connections with your audiences based on helping them and being available.

This is a massive sea-change for the way things work, but I think for ethical creators that care about what they do it presents a massive opportunity too.

If 90% of everything sucks, those in the 10% are going to be massively in demand. All we have to do as creators is make sure we’re firmly camped in the 10%.

Did Any of This Even Have To Happen? 

The most annoying aspect of this entire situation, however, is that it just shouldn’t have been allowed to happen in the first place. 

If Google cared about anything other than profit, it’d have done all it could to protect the open web, creators and publishers. It would have viewed the open web as sacrosanct, something to be revered and not strip-mined for its own financial gain. 

It would have leaned-in HARD on the fact that its search results are more accurate than AI search in ChatGPT. Made the point, over and over again, that LLMs hallucinate and cannot be trusted for serious research or tasks.

The fact it went the complete opposite way, I’ll admit, still baffles me to this day. 

And when it came to training data for these LLMs, the companies behind them could have done a much better, ethical job too given the near infinite amounts of money these companies have at their disposal.  

For instance, Google could have created an opt-in program whereby creators and publishers could outline what they wanted to share and then be remunerated for their contributions

None of this happened, of course; stealing is easier and cheaper and, more often than not, faster. 

The only slight ray of sunshine in this whole debacle is that the vast majority of people seem to hate AI content and everything it represents. 

And that means there’s going to be more and more demand for proper content from actual human beings.