This post was originally published on the Educative Blog.
In the previous months, we've seen some big tech leaders making strange decisions regarding their companies.
X, formerly known as Twitter, enforced stringent rate limits that had a negative impact on user experience. Similarly, Reddit introduced a costly pricing structure for its API, causing dissatisfaction among its loyal users. These events, although distinct, share a common thread. They manifest a broader trend shaping the online world: the conflict between generative AI and abundant content-rich platforms. This clash is significantly altering the digital landscape.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that helps create different types of content, including images, videos, audio, and data. Generative AI is manipulating and will keep manipulating the data users see online. As time progresses, we can expect generative AI to become even more advanced, producing more realistic and sophisticated content. The focus will likely be refining the quality of generated content, improving model stability, and addressing potential biases in the data that these systems could amplify.
What is X's Gameplan?
Companies like X, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, and many others are content-rich platforms. An increasing number of bots are being built to scrape, index, and read these platforms. It's not that companies like X and Reddit can't handle the extra traffic that these bots pose. Instead, these companies actively want to prevent bots from scraping data to feed AI models.
The motive behind this strategy is not based on ethics but is more of a business move. These social platforms have a massive library of human conversations that is economically valuable. But with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language models, human-based data is in high demand. In fact, in X/Twitter's rate limiting product update, that reason is first on their list:
"At a high level, we are working to prevent … [bots and other bad actors] … from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways."
Generative AI models consume the content they get from the Internet and give us the precise answers we want. The more it will have user-generated content, the better its results will be. But why do companies offer free data to Generative AI? If there is no data, there will be no precise results, and AI tools will not be able to perform well. In short, GenAI is great as long as it has access to other human-based databases.
Businesses are putting up a price to see the available data so that users and GenAI have to pay for what they see. Whether through subscriptions or rate limiting, content-rich platforms are becoming "content farms," offering quality and organic content at the cost of AI models.
How Generative AI Will Reshape the Internet?
GenAI is rising, and there is no doubt that it will cause major disruptions around us. It is exciting to see the revolution artificial intelligence can make. But at the same time, with this exciting potential comes the need for vigilant safeguards against spreading misinformation and fake content. In this evolving digital paradigm, understanding the impact of Generative AI and establishing ethical guidelines will be critical to harness its power responsibly and shaping a future innovative and trustworthy internet.
Search Experiences
Generative AI is set to transform the search experience significantly. By enabling more natural language understanding, users can express their queries in everyday language, resulting in more accurate and relevant search results.
Moreover, Google and Bing also announced to add AI to their search experience. Websites have historically welcomed Google's indexing of their web pages as it brought them organic traffic in return. However, if Google successfully replaces the traditional search engine model with generative AI, it could potentially remove the incentive for Google to distribute organic traffic to websites based on their rankings. This situation could lead to a decline in organic traffic for content platforms and other websites, leaving them uncertain about the future of the search experience and its impact on their online presence.
Public Access to Content-Rich Platforms
Just like X and Reddit, we will be expecting more social platforms to shut down their free services and move to subscription-based or other paid packages. Content-rich sites need users to log in, and the APIs will be paywalled. So it will be more difficult to build 3rd party applications that gather information from these platforms.
Global Information Exchange
In previous years, the Internet was focused on making the world a "Global Village" where you can access all the information. Well, you will still be able to do that, but the Internet will be less open. There will be geographic censors and restrictions that will limit your access. It can even occur on a country-wide scale which is nothing new because we've already seen the United States debating whether or not to ban TikTok.
The Vision of the Internet
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has always advocated for making humanity's knowledge open and accessible to all. However, the proposed changes to Search and the potential division of the global Internet highlight generative artificial intelligence as an exception to the principle of free access to information.
Despite being created for human benefit, AI models' effectiveness heavily relies on the information they can access and maintain. This shift places profit-driven motives at the forefront, challenging the original vision of an internet that is free, open, and accessible. The future now rests on a delicate balance between AI companies and the organizations that control content, news, and information, potentially impacting the advancement of human knowledge that was once envisioned.
The Future of Software Development
Software development is not going out of trend anytime soon. However, with the advent of GenAI, the future of software development will expand in various niches. Generative AI will help software developers streamline their tasks and efficiency. But it can not replace software developers because it does not possess qualities like creativity and problem-solving skills.
AI experience will be involved in all types of businesses and applications. For example, autocomplete will be more efficient. Excel sheets will be smarter. Instead of adding the formula, it can respond to human input. So, if you haven't added AI and Machine learning technologies to your skillset, it is time to start doing it.
Educative offers a variety of courses specially created for developers to upscale their skills. Check out our courses Become a Machine Learning Engineer and Zero to Hero in Python for Machine Learning.
Regardless of your background in development, understanding how to harness generative AI can enhance both your efficiency and professional opportunities. However, achieving this demands a distinct skill: the art of prompt engineering. By acquiring the ability to offer suitable context, limitations, and other elements, you can effectively achieve desired outcomes using tools like ChatGPT. Our latest AI-guided courses are designed to assist you in becoming proficient in this skill: All You Need to Know About Prompt Engineering.
The era we're currently in is unparalleled. Although certain shifts may be unsettling, I encourage you to embrace the chance to adapt alongside technology. There's never been a more advantageous (or financially rewarding) moment to develop expertise in AI.
Happy Learning!