To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model

This week Hollywood released details of a new film about Sam Altman and the rise of OpenAI, whose launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has brought high drama to the tech world. One of the most important effects of artificial intelligence (AI) so far is surely on how information is spread online. Instead of typing their questions into search engines, people increasingly pose them to chatbots. Google, which a year ago started adding AI-generated summaries to its results, promises that users can “let Google do the Googling for you”.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The tragedy of the web”