I've already ranted about how using Large Language Models (LLMs) - what passes for "AI" these days - to replace entry level employees will disrupt the very talent pipeline used to create the experienced senior employees used to generate and curate the enormous (terabytes to petabytes) quantities of data used to train the LLMs in the first place. LLMs are merely gigantic "autocomplete" programs making statistical guesses based on their training data. That's why I say this effort isn't sustainable.
But there's another negative feedback loop in the use of LLMs that I just became aware of. Various web and social media tools are starting to provide "AI summaries" in response to user queries. You've probably already experienced these, and have seen that these LLM generated summaries range from usably good or laughably bad.
Here's the problem: studies have shown that between 80% to 90% of humans making queries for which there are AI summaries never go past the summary. They never click on the web links leading to the data on which the summary is based (if such links are even made available). This is in stark contract to conventional web searches, in which the web links are the result of the search, and the user almost inevitably clicks on the link to get the answer for which they were searching.
Because the user never visits the source web page, they never see the advertising used to pay for the generation of the web page. The web site is visited perhaps once and only once, by the LLM web crawler, and never by a human being. This destroys the business model used to pay for the web site in the first place. So the use of AI summaries will eventually result in the loss of the very data used to create the summary.
The only solution I see to this is to paywall all of the news and data sources being used by the AI summary algorithms. Lawsuits are already in progress against the AI companies extracting copyrighted data from advertising supported web sites. Clearly copyrighting the web site alone isn't sufficient to keep their value from being extracted without payment.
Sources
Sabine Hossenfelder, "AI Is Breaking The Internet As We Know It", Backreaction, 2025-12-14, http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/12/ai-is-breaking-internet-as-we-know-it.html
