The Great Extinction: How AI Is Destroying the Internet

We are living through an ecological catastrophe. Only it's not happening in the Amazon rainforest — it's happening in the digital ecosystem of the internet.

Prologue: When a New Predator Entered the Savanna

Imagine an African savanna where super-predators are suddenly dropped in — creatures that run faster than a cheetah, see better than an eagle, never sleep, and know no mercy.

AI assistants have become those super-predators, bursting into the digital savanna. Information websites are dying off like antelopes and zebras. Content aggregators are vanishing like hyenas and jackals. Where there was once a rich ecosystem of knowledge, a digital desert of entertainment remains.

The Source of the Catastrophe: The Battle for the Last Resource

Every ecosystem has a limited resource. On the internet, that resource is human attention and time.

Before AI: Human → Search engine → Websites compete → User chooses a source → Reading and analysis

After AI: Human → AI gives a ready-made answer

A multi-layered food chain has been reduced to just two links.

The First Victims

Wikipedia

Wikipedia's traffic has dropped by 23% over three years. In March 2025, ChatGPT.com attracted 500 million more visits than Wikipedia.

"Who will spend hours writing an article that nobody will read?" The source that feeds AI is slowly dying of exhaustion.

Stack Overflow

The number of questions and answers dropped by 64% in April 2025 compared to April 2024. Experts no longer transfer knowledge to newcomers, who now ask AI directly.

News Sites

AI compiles summaries from dozens of sources. The largest media conglomerates are filing multi-billion dollar lawsuits, having realized they are being turned into a feed base.

The Survivors: Adapting to the New Ecosystem

TikTok and YouTube

Entertainment platforms are thriving. They sell emotions, not information. AI still cannot create video with human charisma and empathy.

Reddit and Pikabu

Social platforms survive thanks to human interaction, not informational content. However, the threat is growing — "What happens when half the commenters turn out to be bots?"

Specialized Services

Banks, stores, booking systems survive because they interact with the real world. But AI chatbots are hot on their heels.

Premium Knowledge

Closed ecosystems are emerging: paid communities, courses, private Slack channels. Knowledge is becoming a privilege instead of democratically accessible.

The Shift in Power

Monopoly on Truth

AI creates an invisible hierarchy of source authority. "This is a new form of censorship — not a ban on words, but a ranking by importance."

AI rips out quotes, losing context — medical disclaimers, legal exceptions, the boundaries of scientific discoveries' applicability all disappear.

The Advertising Ecosystem

Google embeds ads into Bard's responses. ChatGPT is testing sponsored inserts. The new ecosystem belongs to a handful of AI giants — the only gates into the digital world.

The Self-Destruction Paradox

AI weakens the very sources it was trained on. In 10 years, the internet could become:

• Wikipedia — abandoned
• Forums — dead
• News — written by AI
• Bloggers — replaced by AI avatars
• Comments — generated by bots

Digital inbreeding — AI learns from texts written by the previous generation of AI. The result: "AI will become increasingly average, formulaic, predictable."

The "water" disappears — the strange thoughts, unexpected connections, human mistakes that make texts alive.

Content entropy — the internet fills up with "a gray mass of beautifully written but empty texts. Like a swamp where all life has suffocated."

The New Ecosystem

The internet is transforming from a "world library" into a "global amusement park." Uniform content, chatbot conversation partners, ever less frequently visited places, and finally — "the boundless horizon has shrunk into a small comfortable ChatGPT window."

Epilogue: What Awaits Us?

Is this inevitable? We need to recognize the value of reading sources, comparing viewpoints, analyzing, forming our own opinions.

Possible solutions:

• Support "nature reserves" of the old ecosystem
• Equal access laws, quotas for source representation in AI
• A "solidarity tax" on AI

Or accept the inevitable: "knowledge is monopolized, entertainment is algorithmized, human curiosity is satisfied by only one source."

"Although, what happens to a species that stops hunting on its own, stops foraging, that gets served ready-made food? It doesn't necessarily go extinct — it simply becomes domesticated."