Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?
About this episode
The second of three AI shows asks what generative AI is doing to the internet — whether the flood of AI content will break it or save it. Nilay Patel, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge, argues AI is flooding distribution channels with "at best C+ content," breaking recommendation algorithms, truth-discernment, and the internet's business models. Google's ad-driven model created SEO spam long before AI, they note — and Google is now torn between generating AI content and ranking it. They discuss the poisoning of the informational commons: AI search products like Perplexity and Arc remix publishers' work without sending traffic, destroying both the business model for news and AI's own training data. The optimistic turn: as trust collapses, there may be a "flight to quality" — a premium on verified, human-curated work and real creator-audience relationships over platform traffic. They also debate AI art's "hollowness" through Walter Benjamin's "aura."