AI is remaking — and breaking — the web
The AI-fixated tech industry is rapidly dismantling the old web, with no game plan for how to replace it.
State of play: Chatbots have already begun to intercept web traffic and drain publishers’ revenue. Now tech giants and startups aim to remodel the devices and browsers we use to access web pages, using AI to summarize or pre-empt the content that people and publishers post online.
Driving the news: Tech circles were abuzz over the past week with news from the normally sedate browser world — the software category that has been shaping access to digital information since the ’90s.
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Firefox last week debuted an experimental browser tool that provides AI summaries when users hover over links.
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Also last week, the Browser Company, maker of the Arc browser that’s beloved by some power users, announced it was pivoting to focus on a new AI-powered browser called Dia.
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OpenAI has long been rumored to be working on its own browser, but has yet to ship anything.
Over the last two years Google, which customarily casts itself as champion of the open web, has steadily increased the prominence of its AI summaries in every aspect of search.
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At Google’s I/O developer conference last year it announced the U.S.-wide rollout of the AI summaries, which sit on top of search results and allow users to get their answers without clicking through to source pages (while also sometimes providing made-up facts).
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At this year’s I/O, the company said that AI Mode, which turns a user’s search into an AI chat conversation, would now be a standard feature — although some early reviews have found its information unreliable.
