World Wide Web Inventor Warns Generative AI is Threatening Online Advertisement
Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, has warned that the rise of generative artificial intelligence is going to threaten a very basic economic framework of the internet. It could be that if people stop going to any website at all and started asking an AI about its contents instead, the entire system of online advertising might just fail.
How AI Bypasses the Current System
Berners-Lee further expounded the core of the problem at the Financial Times Future of AI Summit in London: AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini read websites and give the user a summarized answer directly. Under this situation, there is no longer a need for a person accessing the source website; that person will not see the advertisement that supports the creation of and maintenance for the site.
Advertising models will collapse if AI extracts information from web pages and serves the result directly to the user. That threatens the existence of millions of sites that live off impressions and clicks.
Tim Berners-Lee
Opportunity for a "Reset"
And this is what Berners-Lee described as the potential "reset button" for the internet. Many people already complain about online advertising, the intrusive and too invasive algorithms for tracking behavior where he further suggested the development of new monetization models in more transparency and honesty. In this future vision, the user would no longer be treated like a product, moving the internet from advertisement dependency and towards a sustainable and user-respecting ecosystem.
