Artificial intelligence is eating up the Internet, but many hope human-generated content will prevail

With artificial intelligence encroaching on all corners of the internet, from fake articles to… Instagram reelsthere is concern that human-generated content is under threat, and as a result, so is… filmand the music and publishing industries.

there Artificial intelligence representativesAI generated music Fill Spotify and Artificial intelligence answers At the top of your Google search, above the 10 blue links.

But news and media consumers are still uncomfortable with the idea of ​​content being generated entirely by artificial intelligence. Modern Reuters Institute poll Of people in six countries, including the United States, they found that only 12% of people are comfortable with news generated entirely by AI, compared to 62% who prefer their news to be entirely human-generated.

This desire for human-generated content has made some publishing executives optimistic, including Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, owner of CNET. He said this on a recent episode of the podcast Channels with Peter Kafka.

“The prevailing narrative is that the decline in search traffic is somehow existential, and I don’t see it that way,” Shah said.

“I still think we prefer words, sounds and videos from humans,” he added. “Do I think the robots will eat some of that? I think so.”

Online search and content analysts see the same preferences among consumers.

“I also agree that as Google continues to roll out new AI search features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, users will continue to search for original content from real humans,” said Lily Rae, vice president of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, a marketing agency. “And when the AI ​​answer is not enough to meet those needs, they will continue to search for Content that provides that feeling of real human connection.”

As artificial intelligence rapidly changes how people find information online, publishers are moving quickly to close deals. For example, News Corp, Axel Springer, and Future PLC have signed content licensing agreements with OpenAI. Other companies deal with artificial intelligence companies directly.

AI models are trained on the entire set of online information, which includes published journalistic content. Most recently, Penske Media, which owns Variety and Rolling Stone, Google has been sued over its use of AI Overviewswhich delivers AI-generated answers at the top of the search. Penske claims that Google is abusing its monopoly power in online search and that AI Overviews is stealing Penske’s content, circumventing the need for readers to click on articles directly.

Ziff Davis, along with The New York Times, has sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI for deleting journalistic content to train AI models instead of signing a licensing deal. Shah told Kafka that OpenAI rejected Zev Davis’ attempts to negotiate a licensing deal.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Zev Davis said Shah was unavailable for comment.

The strong response from publishers comes as Wall Street rewards Google, chipmaker Nvidia and Microsoft’s OpenAI with record valuations even as the publishing industry shrinks. There was a great deal Decrease in internet traffic In 2025. This year too, the publishing industry has seen layoffs CNN, Fox Media, HuffPostthe Los Angeles Times and nbc.

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Another way publishers are fighting back is by trying to prevent AI crawlers from scraping their content for free. In addition to the blocks in the robots.txt file, which is a file on a website that specifies certain permissions from online crawlers, Ziff Davis signed to RSL Standarda more powerful layer of technology that can prevent AI bots from absorbing content. The hope is that if enough publishers sign on, it might be enough to present a united front to reach a better deal with the big tech companies.

Despite the growing popularity of AI, Shah feels that people will eventually prefer “the words, sounds and videos of humans.” He also points out that brands are increasingly trying to have their products populate AI search results, which is not good for making objective purchasing decisions.

“If you start looking at the citations in LLM chatbots, you will see that the sources have moved from journalistic sources to marketing sources,” Shah said. “And so, someone has to measure this because I’m amazed at the number of citations that don’t belong to Publisher.com but to Brand.com.”