Factually! with Adam Conover - AI Has Ruined the Internet

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

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This is a headgum podcast. You know, sometimes I'm accused of hating AI just because I'm old now. And I know you can't tell from my taut-duey skin, but underneath my skeleton is rapidly disintegrating. And there is this pattern where the technology that comes out when you're young is exciting. But once you hit middle-aged, you see every new invention as against the natural order of things. And sure, I loved the internet when I was 15 years old. But now that I'm in my 40s, maybe I've become unk.

that has turned me into an AI hater just because I can't hang with today's miraculous invention. But no, f*** that. Because first of all, young people are AI haters more than anyone, so I'm not unk, if anything, I'm NIF. And secondly, do you wanna know the real reason I hate AI? It's because AI is destroying the modern invention I care about the most, the internet.

You know, when my family got broadband for the first time, it was intoxicating, it changed my life. I was suddenly exposed to message boards, writers and bloggers, bedroom musicians, independent artists, a teeming mass of real people sharing their ideas and their artwork and their humanity. And that was a big deal because before the internet, hearing from real people who didn't like live in your town was actually really hard. Instead, giant media corporations got to choose what voices the rest of us got to hear. But the internet changed all of that.

It put all of us. billions of real people together in this crazy soup and let us talk to each other, for better or worse, outside of the bounds of geography, social class, or nationality. Suddenly, if you were suspicious of a product from a commercial, you could turn to a forum or a review website and find out from a real person, whether a thigh master was worth buying,

or Miss Cleo was worth calling, or what the hell was up with that guy with the question marks on his suit? I still don't know, but I could look it up right now if I wanted to. And hey, no longer could those snobby editors at the book publishing company stand between me and sexy werewolf fanfic written by random Nebraska housewives. Ooh, it makes me want to howl just thinking about it. Oh, oh, oh. Oh! You can even read or write anti-capitalist or politically subversive information without corporations or the government being able to stop you.

And I started spending every night exploring the world of human knowledge, creating and uploading creative projects and downloading images of, sexy homestar off of lime wire. The real people on the internet made me the person I am today. And now, AI is crowding those people out, and it's destroying the internet. That thing we all love. Artificial intelligence has taken over our search results. It's forcing valuable legacy websites to shut down,

and it is turning the last refuges of humanity into dead forests full of bots. And I am pissed about it. So two years ago, I made a video called, called How Google Ruin the Internet. It was all about how Google and sh-fied itself from a search company into an ad company that forced sites to either pay for placement or fill themselves with SEO spam in order to be seen by internet users at all. And thus, Google was destroying the internet as we knew it.

Oh, well, sweet summer child, in just two years, things have gotten so much worse that that video seems as quaint as an episode of Masterpiece Theater. Because these days, Google doesn't bring you to websites at all. No, instead it serves you an AI summary via Gemini whether you like it or not. And that is annihilating the very sites that the internet, in fact that Google itself is based on. See, the reason Google's SEO fucking was so pernicious was because Google was the main, really the only way websites got traffic in the first place. See, you would ask Google a question, it would show you a link, you'd click on the link and travel to the site, and then the site could show you an ad or turn you into a subscribe. or in the case of neopets sell you a picture of a collar to put on a digital dog.

But in order for that business model, for any business model for any website to work, you have to click the link and go to the site. But now that there's an AI answer at the top of every page of Google results, why would you? Like, okay, I'll give you an example. I've been playing this wonderful new video game called Mina the Hollower. It's super fun, but I got stuck on a certain part of the game. So I googled it.

I typed in How to Get to Bone Beach. I don't know why it's so hard to get to Bone Beach, but whatever. It just is a lot of people have this problem in the game. When I typed it in, Gemini AI literally just told me the answer at the top of the search results. But where did it get that answer? Did Gemini play the game and learn how to do all the most difficult bits? That would be artificially intelligent indeed. But no, it didn't.

It just copied the work of human beings who played the game and then shared the information on how to get to Bone Beach, either out of the goodness of their heart on a forum post, or because they were paid to do so as part of their job writing for a video game website. But instead of sending me to that website so the website could, you know, profit a little bit off of solving my problem, Google Gemini sucked up the information

and served it to me directly like a thief. It's somewhat baffling that Google is doing this at all, because they are starving the very websites, their AI, and the entire internet is built on. And this isn't just anecdotal or hypothetical. In one study, Pew Research found that the presence of an AI answer above Google search results cuts clicks on links by almost half. Google search traffic to websites like Washington Post and Business Insider has fallen by almost 50%.

And SEOs or search engine optimizers have literally rebranded their businesses to AIOs, AI optimizers. I mean, this is a fundamental restructuring of how the internet works that just makes it straight up impossible to publish anything on the internet. Like, under the terms of the old deal, Google was, the map at the front of the mall. It showed you where you could find Spencer's gifts, and then you would go to Spencer's gifts with your buddies and give the guy at Spencer's gifts money so you could get your hands on a big boob stress ball. And don't worry, if you don't want a stress ball, you can also get a willy water bottle. But what Google is doing

now is basically stealing all those hilarious novelty genitals from the stores and selling them from a dirty van in front of the mall. You don't even have to go in to get the goods now, and under those conditions, it ain't going to be long before the mall goes out. out of business. And where are you gonna get your plastic boobs and dicks from men, huh, Google? Oh, and if you're a publisher who wants to lock the door and stop Google from walking out with your product, well, too bad. Because Google designed their AI crawlers such that if you exclude yourself from AI training, you also remove yourself from Google's search results. And since Google controls more than 90% of the search market, that essentially makes you invisible

to the entire internet. I mean, Google is such a flagrant monopoly, even gemma. and I says that's what it is. And AI isn't just starving independent publishers of traffic. It's literally destroying the sites themselves. The writer Stephen Follows recently covered what happened at the site The Numbers.com, and this story is terrifying. The Numbers is a site that is tracked and reported on film industry box office receipts for 30 years.

Even if you've never used it, you've definitely been impacted by their work. The site gets 8 million visitors a year. It's relied on by journalists, the film industry itself. And even the Guinness Book of World Records uses its data. It's considered the definitive authority on box office numbers. But, you know, recently a couple new sites have also started leaning heavily on the numbers data. Kalshi and Polly Market. They use the data to settle bets.

And that is the problem, because the degenerate gamblers who use prediction market sites have started sending swarm after swarm of AI scrapers at the numbers to try and get the box office receipts early so they can insider trade off of them. Hey, remember when Martha Stewart went to prison for that? Well, justice for Martha, this is way worse. These AI tools have hammered the Numbers.com so mercilessly that its traffic became 90% AI bots. That was so much traffic, in fact, that its servers were overloaded and the site had to literally shut down. And when the admins were finally able to relaunch, they had to do so with a bare bones version of the site.

They literally had to remove hundreds of thousands of pages of historical film data, because they could not protect that much legacy web code from being hacked by AI bots trying to get in. And that means that the Numbers.com, which is still trucking, please go support them. They're good people. Well, their site, though, is not as useful for humans as it used to be because AI ruined it. And the numbers isn't the only site that this has happened to. Multiple invaluable small websites have been hit by swarms of AI bots and have had trouble staying afloat. You know, the vast network of small independent websites is part of what made the Internet great. It's part of what got us around corporate control of the media.

It's how generations of people have expressed themselves and shared information they cared about. And it is a genuine tragedy to see that network crumble under the weight of AI. But of course, you know, the independent web, it was already being swallowed up by monopolist websites like social media and Reddit before AI, right? Well, you know what's crazy?

Now even those sites are getting f***ed by AI. Like, okay, let's talk about Reddit for a second. Remember, the greatest thing about the internet was that it gave real people a place to get together and talk about our weird shared interests. And most of that activity used to take place in millions of forums, message boards spread across the web. But as a little site called Reddit began to grow,

it started centralizing all those communities in one place, just like Instagram and Facebook centralized social media and YouTube took over online video. And today, if you want to talk about your hobby or see some weird-ass memes, or find communities, with other people who have the same niche problem you do, you're probably going to go to Reddit first, right? In fact, Reddit became so famous

as the last place where real people could be found online that it's become common to add Reddit to the end of our web searches whenever you need to find an answer from a real person. And, you know, it's not great that one company has monopolized the space that thoroughly, but hey, at least Reddit's still full of real people, right? You can go there to look for a date

with this mustache-oed cutie who apparently loves goats or brag about your new sewing project or even to find out if that thing on your butt is cancer. I thought it'd be nice to not show you a picture of that one. That subreddit is a little stuff to look at. But honestly, that's what I always loved about the internet, right? That's the best thing about it. It's where real people can be their real weird selves

and talk about their real weird lives. And that's what Reddit was until AI rolled in. Because remember, LLMs need massive amounts of training data, right? Text, images, ideas, grammar, sentence structure, and they need it from real people. AI is a parasite that feeds off of our authentic humanity in order to attempt to reproduce it. So as the biggest remaining repository of raw humanity on the internet,

Reddit is invaluable to AI companies. Reddit is now the number one source cited by AI chatbots. That means that your hobbies, your advice to your fellow human beings, even your weird fetishes and moles, they are all being ingested by Gemini and barf back up to you as an AI overview. And Reddit knows this because guess what? Google is paying them 60 mil a year

to make it happen. Oh, and real quick, if you're worried about how much of your data is online, check out our sponsor, Delete Me. Their teams of experts diligently hunt down your personal information like your name, address, and phone number from data broker websites and remove it,

keeping you safe from scammers, identity thieves, and other bad actors. I've used Delete Me for years before they ever advertised on this channel, and I can tell you it's a fantastic service that really works. And get this, you can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to join Deleteme.com slash Adam

and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's joinedeletme.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. Now, you know, it's bad enough that Reddit is selling all of its users' activity and information to AI companies, but they are also destroying themselves in order to do it. Because remember, anyone can post on Reddit. And since all those companies out there

that want to sell you crap, know that AI is trained on Reddit, and they know that AI is quickly supplanting real web search, well, they have started secretly planting comments and posts on Reddit that seem real, but are actually just promotion designed to trick the AI into saying what they wanted to say. Oh, and it's not the nice, friendly companies doing this. It's the peptide and hormone companies.

One subreddit even had to ban posts about peptides entirely because this practice was so rampant. In fact, there are now entire AI businesses dedicated to doing nothing but spamming Reddit, like Red Rover, which advertises, quote, AI agents that monitor subreddits 24-7 to join relevant conversations and suggest your product to users in a natural way.

That means that, instead of a place where real people get together, Reddit is quickly turning into a nest of AI chatbots talking to each other in thinly veiled advertisements. Explain to me like I'm five, why Hulco supplements work so well. Take these upboats, good, sir. Hulco supplements also taste great. Why are the bots typing? Where are they typing?

Okay, you know what this means? It means that because of AI, the dead internet theory is true. If you haven't heard of it, dead internet theory was originally a conspiracy theory. It was first posted in 2021 on a tiny, super retro-looking chat board. Ah, look at that screenshot.

The old days brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it? By someone called Illuminati Pirate. And this user's theory was basically that most of what we think of as humans on the internet is actually just bot generated bullshy and paid media influencers all done in order to, quote, manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly normalized cultural products.

Now a few years ago, maybe that sounded a little far-fetched. But today, it's fucking real. According to Cloudflare, 60% of all internet traffic today is bots. 60%. The internet used to be a place where you could find a real human being to talk to, where you could read a real person's freaky fanfic, or their genuine thoughts about model trains,

or their actual experiences in their body, or their actual experiences out of their body if you were reading a trip report on erowid.org. But now, the Internet's turned into a place where we passively receive marketing, propaganda, and spam generated for us by AIs run by massive corporations, just like the bad old days. In fact, it's worse,

because today it's not just on newsstands and TVs. It's in our pockets, Following us around everywhere, posting on our sites, and wearing the skin of a human, pretending to be something that it isn't. And this is why I'm an AI hater, not just because it's writing is hack, and it's hastening climate change,

and the flyers for local businesses it generates are way too busy, okay? It's because it is destroying the human internet I love. AI was created by a few rich billionaires for their benefit, and they are using it to muscle into places we built for ourselves for human connection to suck up all the poetry and art and conversations and arguments and 100,000 word reviews of direct-to-video,

My Little Pony movies that we made to chew them up, spit them out, and sell them back to us for the cost of a Gemini subscription. And they're destroying our internet to do it. So what do we do about it? Well, apart from going to a local city council meeting and throwing a pie to a politician who voted yes for a data center, you could support real people on the internet.

Like, remember that game I was talking about, Mina the Hollower? Well, it was created by a wonderful team of real-life humans who worked on the game for six years. It's incredible. It's super fun, and it also happens to be a cautionary tale about technological convenience run amok. I'll put a link in the show notes, check it out. It's a lot of fun, you should play it.

Or you could support 404 Media, a journalist-owned media company that does incredible reporting on the tech industry and the internet. They deserve your support, too, at 404media.co. And, you know, it's why I'm so grateful that you're here supporting this channel and the real humans who make it with me.

And if you want to support us, real humans, directly, while you can head to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Adam Conover, where we have an awesome online community full of real people, no AI allowed in, who love talking about their weird human interests together. We also have a lot of fun bonus content. In fact, I'm actually uploading an interview I just did with the developers of Mina the Hollowar

all about how they made the game and what their creative process was like exclusively for my patrons, real people like you. Because you know what? I'm not ready to let the human internet die. As long as I have a computer on my desk with an Ethernet cable jammed in its ass,

I'm going to keep trying to find community on the internet. Because you know what? We humans all buy our lonesome, well, we may not be able to replace Google entirely or bring back the old open internet of the past, but at least we can tell each other how to get to be. Bone Beach. I mean, just go to the beach with me. Any beach I go to is bone beach. You know what I mean? Come on. How'd they miss that one? Slow hanging fruit!

That was a hate gum podcast.