AI Summaries Are Killing the Web I Love

''' I searched for a recipe the other day. Not for anything fancy. A simple chocolate chip cookie recipe. For years, a search like that would send me to a handful of food blogs, each run by a real person.

I’d get the recipe, sure. But I’d also get a story about a grandmother from Akron, a messy afternoon with the kids, or the frustrating, obsessive, ten-year quest to perfect the chewiness. I’d see pictures of real cookies on a real sheet pan, not a stock photo. I’d get a person.

This time, I got a gray box.

A sterile, bulleted list, auto-generated by Google’s new AI Overviews. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of a recipe, stitched together from the very blogs it was now hiding from me. It was correct, I guess. But it was soulless. And it represents the single greatest threat to the open web we've ever faced.

This is the new bargain we're being offered: trade the vibrant, chaotic, human library of the internet for a single, AI-generated index card. And it’s a deal only a fool would take.

The Vampire in the Machine

Let’s not mince words. AI summaries from companies like Google, Perplexity AI, and a dozen others are fundamentally parasitic. They are a form of high-tech plagiarism, laundered through an algorithm.

These systems crawl the web, hoovering up the hard work of millions of writers, artists, reviewers, experts, and hobbyists. They digest that human-made content and then regurgitate a condensed, flavorless version on the search results page. The goal is simple: to keep you there. To answer your question without you ever needing to click on a link.

Every time you accept an AI summary instead of clicking through to the source, you are casting a vote for a dead internet.

For two decades, the web worked on a fragile but functional contract. People created content, and in exchange for that content, we, the readers, visited their pages. That visit generated a fraction of a cent in ad revenue, or maybe an affiliate sale, or perhaps just the satisfaction of being read. It was a tiny, distributed, democratic ecosystem.

AI summaries blow that contract to smithereens. The creator’s work is scraped, their voice is erased, their context is lost, and they get nothing. Their traffic collapses. Their ad revenue dries up. Their incentive to create vanishes.

This isn't innovation. It's a heist.

An Internet of Dead Ends

The most magical thing about the old web was serendipity. It was the joy of the rabbit hole. You’d search for one thing, click a link that looked interesting, and an hour later you’d be deep in a niche forum about vintage synthesizers or a lovingly curated archive of 19th-century maps.

AI summaries are the antithesis of this. They are a cul-de-sac. A dead end. You ask a question, the algorithm gives you a singular answer, and the journey is over. There’s nowhere else to go. No new blog to discover, no new author to follow, no weird community to join.

It trades the joy of discovery for the dullness of efficiency. It transforms a sprawling, chaotic, fascinating city into a single, boring, beige office park. Why explore the side streets when a giant billboard at the entrance claims to tell you everything you need to know?

The problem is, the billboard is often wrong, incomplete, or just making things up. And worse, it’s actively tearing down the city behind it for raw materials.

Your Convenience Is Costing Someone Everything

Who pays the price for this frictionless convenience? Not the tech giants, obviously. They’re saving money and consolidating power.

No, the price is paid by the person who runs the knitting blog. The retired mechanic who maintains a forum for fixing old trucks. The amateur historian who digitizes public domain documents in her spare time. The travel blogger who took a risk to write an honest, unflattering review of a tourist trap.

These are the people who built the web we love. They did it out of passion, curiosity, and a desire to share. This new AI-driven web treats their work as a free resource to be strip-mined for value, then discards the husk. Their livelihood, their passion project, their tiny corner of the internet is being systematically dismantled to make a tech company’s quarterly earnings report look a little better.

When these people can no longer afford to create, they will stop. And what will the AIs of tomorrow scrape? What will they summarize? They’ll be left to feed on the AI-generated slop of their predecessors, an endless, inbred loop of meaningless, recycled content. A digital desert.

It’s time to push back. Reject the gray box. Scroll past the AI summary and click a real link. Click two! Reward a human. Re-learn the joy of discovery, of reading something with a point of view, even if you disagree with it.

The open web is one of the greatest inventions of our lifetime. Don’t let it die a boring, summarized, and utterly soulless death. '''