Unlike search engines, AI platforms are built on precision and summaries. They’re unlikely to be a major source of traffic or advertising revenue. What about getting paid for the summaries OpenAI serves in response to prompts? These prompts will vary widely, as will the responses, breaking the traditional mass-media revenue model. As I explained in my “future of browser” article, information itself is being atomized, which will likely upend the web and media as we know them…. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity… won’t need the media for long.
What does it mean to not “need the media” anymore? Chatbots know nothing of the observable universe—they are fed media, during and after training. OpenAI et. al. do not experience events as they happen. Reporters are on-site witnesses and produce original analyses that comprise both the news we consume and the content AI is fed.
The internet was originally envisioned as a place for connection, collaboration, and discovery. But over time, it has been distorted by business models that prioritize engagement metrics over meaningful interaction. Discovery has long been the open web’s greatest challenge, with search engines turning it into an SEO game and social platforms creating algorithmic echo chambers. AI platforms are making discovery almost irrelevant.
This is because the greatest challenge has always, in fact, been monetization. Before the internet, you could sell people the paper your news was printed on to fund its production. When the internet first arrived, it was a toy and money wasn’t a factor. When real people came online, money made everything bigger and better but also introduced ads, engagement, and the rest of that garbage fire because we’ve all agreed that web pages are free.
If ChatGPT takes over the internet and we say that news companies can’t make money through their existing channels anymore, they will need to find yet another way to pay their staff. I hesitate to say that we are running out of business models, but we are certainly burning through them at an alarming rate. More importantly they all seem to suck.
You stay still, but your AI agent goes out and fetches, distills, and synthesizes the content and renders it in whatever format you want — audio, video, or text. This is the future.
Not if there is no content to synthesize, because they have been driven to bankruptcy. Mass media is an invention, not a necessary constant. If AI obsoletes the news by providing people with a mouthpiece that they prefer, without providing a backstop for the companies that produce its sources, it will run out of material to synthesize.