The rise of merchants of menace: What will the internet of the future look like?

They’re calling it AI contamination. As content created by large language models (LLMs) seeps across domains like an oil spill, it will likely have two outcomes.

In the first, it will become more difficult to tell truth from fabrication, and this will hasten the enshittification or drop in quality of the information provided by the internet.

The second outcome will be a clearing of the skies, somewhat, as walled gardens of protected content form, open to users in premium, freemium and other subscription models.

News-website paywalls and YouTube Premium are early examples. But across vast swathes of the internet, the contamination is in free flow.

“Welcome to the world’s first fully AI-generated website!” reads the disclaimer on the landing page of The Enlightened Mindset.

The website offers no ownership details or contact information but lists hundreds of articles, by “contributors” with names such as Happy Sharer and Crazy Lee. Titles include “Is Hagrid Played By a Robot? An Exploration of the Possibility”, “How to Be More Ladylike: Speak Softly, Dress Modestly, Carry Yourself with Grace” and “How to Be Dangerous: Learn Self-Defense, Carry a Concealed Weapon, and Build a Network”.

The stories contain made-up quotes attributed to real people. The Hagrid story contains one from “a Dr Reuben Binns, professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge” on the drawbacks of casting a robot as Hagrid. In the real world, Binns is an associate professor of human-centered computing at the University of Oxford.

The number of platforms using such approaches is growing, and most offer no disclaimer.