Recently, while on vacation, a friend asked me, “How long can you keep water in a swimming pool without adding chlorine?” I never had a pool myself, so I replied: “I don’t know. If you want, I can look it up on the Internet, but it will take me at least half an hour”.
Then I had the idea to get out my ChatGPT application. I typed the question in almost the same words. Here is the answer (you can read the whole conversation here in the original format: https://chatgpt.com/share/de259cb0-17df-486b-ab62-936b5a03c378 ):
I was stunned. I had been using ChatGPT for more and more things lately, and was often amazed at the quality and speed of the answers, but I still hadn’t expected this at this moment. It was a precise answer to my question (as much as possible), within seconds, not minutes.
The perfect answer
I concluded that we probably need to add chlorine. So how much? That was an obvious follow-up question:
“How much chlorine to add?”
What I got was a summary lecture on the use of chlorine in pools, including some sample calculations (you can read them all at the link above).
At that moment, I could have just taken the information, converted gallons to cubic meters (with my converter app), done some simple calculations… but then it hit me again: Why not ask ChatGPT to do the math for me?
I typed:
“How much chlorine do I need for 200 m3 of water at 2 ppm?”
The answer blew me away. This was a textbook answer, a step-by-step calculation, an answer to an exam question that would have gotten top marks in any school.
Who needs websites?
So why would anyone search the Internet for them in the future? I was sure of the answer: no one. This was just so much more convenient, no Google search could ever compete with it.
But then I wondered where ChatGPT got all this information. The answer was obvious: from the very same websites! As every marketer and most other people know, there are zillions of websites out there, created by all kinds of people and companies, trying to provide useful information and answer questions like these – hoping that Google will rank their site high enough to attract visitors.
Once someone visits these sites, the people or companies that created them will either benefit from advertising placed on their sites, or ideally the company will generate leads for their products, such as chlorine for swimming pools and water testing kits.
Now, with ChatGPT – no more visitors to these sites in the future, that was obvious. ChatGPT has already absorbed all this information put out by these people and companies and will answer the question directly.
The users will be happy.
But what about the people who provided the information, hoping for advertising revenue, or new sales leads?
They certainly won’t be happy about their abandoned sites. As a result, there will be no incentive to provide that information anymore, right? So people and companies will stop doing it… and then – what? Where will ChatGPT get updated information once the huge pool of information it has ingested today becomes outdated?
This is a question not many people have asked yet, but I think it is at the heart of the future of the Internet. AI summaries will not only affect professional publishers – who build their entire business on traffic to their sites. AI will affect almost every single website, except maybe those that offer transactions (but even those are already being integrated into AI chatbots using a technology called “agents”).
The Internet, as we have known it, is again under threat. Last time, a lot of providers and companies moved to social media platforms; this time, I cannot yet see a solution. Advertising will move with the end users to the big AI platforms like OpenAI, Google and others. But people creating genuine content? I don’t see how they can earn from this. AI platforms are there to take your content for free and re-phrase and re-distribute with their own advertisement or for their subscription.