AI and the Web: The Coming Creative Crisis

This article presents a more skeptical, critical view of the impact of generative AI on creators and the open web. If you’d like to start with the more optimistic take, read: AI and the Web: A Future Full of Potential.

AI’s Impact on the Web Is Not Just Evolution, It’s Displacement

The article "AI and the Web: A Future Full of Potential" paints an optimistic picture of the digital future shaped by generative AI — a future in which blogs, websites, and content creators can simply “evolve” and adapt to thrive alongside machine-generated content. However, such a narrative glosses over some of the deeper structural, economic, and philosophical concerns that AI disruption presents. While well-intentioned and rich in strategic advice, the piece ultimately adopts a techno-solutionist tone, assuming that AI disruption is inevitable and mostly beneficial — and that all creators need is agility and positivity to weather the storm.

In reality, the future of human-generated content is not simply a matter of adaptation, but one of systemic displacement, economic imbalance, and cultural homogenization. Below is a more grounded critique of the article’s premises, highlighting what’s missing and where its assumptions may be flawed or overly idealistic.

1. Framing the AI Disruption as “Evolution” Masks Its Extractive Nature

The article positions AI disruption as a form of digital evolution — an opportunity for human creators to lean into their unique strengths. However, this framing sidesteps a central, uncomfortable reality: generative AI systems are fundamentally extractive.

They are trained on vast amounts of content — including blogs, tutorials, forum posts, news articles, code snippets, and creative works — created by humans who were never asked for consent, never compensated, and never credited. The euphemistic language of “synthesis” conceals the fact that these models derive value from the unpaid labor of millions of writers, journalists, artists, and developers.

Far from being a fair or collaborative process, this is knowledge enclosure at scale — where public (and even private) knowledge is absorbed into AI systems that now compete directly with their original sources. The analogy is less “evolution” and more “industrial disruption without compensation.”

2. The Economic Fallout Is Not a Footnote — It’s the Core Problem

The article acknowledges the decline in page views and advertising revenue, but treats it as an inconvenience to be mitigated through diversification. This severely understates the economic crisis facing small publishers, independent bloggers, and even established news outlets. If traffic and ad revenue plummet — not due to lack of relevance, but because AI platforms intercept queries and offer answers directly — the core business model of the open web collapses.

This is not merely a signal to “pivot to affiliate links” or “try Patreon.” It’s a market distortion where AI companies profit from the very content ecosystems they undermine — often without sharing those profits. In this environment, creators aren’t just adapting — they’re being systematically devalued.

3. E-E-A-T and Trust Signals Won’t Save Most Sites

The article emphasizes the importance of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) as a defense against AI dominance. But while these are important principles, their protective power is overstated.

AI models already produce content that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations, confident tone, and logical structure. Most users — especially casual searchers — cannot easily distinguish between authentic expertise and AI-generated coherence. The illusion of authority is often enough.

Moreover, search engines themselves (now integrating AI-generated summaries) are under no obligation to fairly attribute or link back to the sources they summarize. Even if your content meets the highest E-E-A-T standards, it may still be summarized away by a chatbot interface, leaving you without credit, traffic, or compensation.

4. The “Human Connection” Argument Is Idealistic and Elitist

The article’s claim that people will always seek human connection, personality, and storytelling is true — but not at the scale required to sustain most creators. For every artisanal blogger who builds a loyal niche audience, thousands of content creators rely on broader, search-driven visibility to monetize their work.

Expecting everyone to “just be more personal, unique, or community-driven” ignores the harsh economic reality: connection doesn’t scale like utility. People may enjoy a personality-driven podcast or a charismatic cooking blog, but for 95% of information queries, convenience wins. And AI will increasingly provide that convenience faster, cheaper, and more interactively than traditional websites.

This is not about quality versus quantity — it’s about the collapse of viable economic terrain between viral influencers and hyper-niche experts.

5. AI Will Not Just Disrupt SEO — It Will Replace Entire Content Categories

The article tries to reassure creators that only “surface-level” content is under threat. But the reality is that AI can already replace most forms of functional content, including:

• Tutorials and how-tos (especially when paired with images or videos generated by multimodal models)

• Basic product reviews (via aggregate sentiment and specs)

• Informational articles, glossaries, comparisons, summaries

• Even code snippets, legal templates, and technical documentation

It’s not just about "simple definitions" anymore. The capabilities of LLMs are advancing rapidly, and multimodal models like OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Gemini 1.5 are starting to eat into multimedia and video content domains as well. The notion that AI will always need human-created “source material” may become obsolete if these systems evolve to simulate not just facts, but methodologies, styles, and even interactivity.

6. The “Human-AI Symbiosis” Is Unequal and Risk-Laden

The article encourages creators to “use AI as a tool, not a competitor.” This is a nice sentiment — and AI tools can certainly enhance workflow, productivity, and ideation. But here too, the optimism glosses over uncomfortable realities:

• Platform risk: Many AI tools are controlled by the same companies that are disrupting creators’ traffic and revenue models.

• Content devaluation: Using AI to accelerate content production often results in homogenization, which further devalues originality and weakens long-term brand trust.

• Skill erosion: Relying on AI too heavily may erode core creative skills over time, just as calculators changed how people engage with math.

The future may be less symbiotic than parasitic — where creators are pushed to use AI to stay relevant in a system increasingly designed to reward volume, speed, and scale over quality and depth.

7. Missing: The Political, Legal, and Cultural Dimensions

Finally, the article avoids any serious discussion of the broader regulatory, ethical, and philosophical questions at stake:

• Should AI companies be allowed to train on content without permission?

• Should there be mandatory compensation mechanisms for creators?

• Who decides what “trustworthy” content gets surfaced or cited by AI systems?

• What happens to knowledge diversity when everything is filtered through a handful of opaque models?

These are not theoretical questions. They will shape whether the future of the web remains a semi-open commons or becomes a walled garden of algorithmic summaries controlled by a few dominant actors.

Not Just a New Chapter — A Paradigm Shift with Real Casualties

AI and the Web: A Future Full of Potential offers valuable insight for creators looking to adapt — but it does so by downplaying or ignoring the power asymmetries and extraction-based dynamics that define this new era. It romanticizes resilience while failing to confront the structural damage AI is already causing to the open web, creator economies, and digital diversity.

The rise of generative AI is not merely an “evolution.” It’s a reconfiguration of digital value chains — one in which the benefits accrue to a few platform owners, while the costs are distributed across millions of creators whose work laid the foundation for these models in the first place.

Adaptation is essential, yes — but so is resistance, regulation, and reinvention of the systems that govern digital content and ownership. If we don’t ask harder questions now, we risk building an internet optimized for algorithms, not for people.

Let we know what you think about the post AI and the web: The Coming Creative Crisis

Whether you see AI as a creative revolution or a disruptive takeover, the implications are real and complex.

For a hopeful roadmap to adaptation, read the other side: AI and the Web: A Future Full of Potential. Which side do you find more compelling — and why? Join the conversation in the comments.