Google wants to be the interface for the web

The opening of Google I/O this year (35-minute video recap) showed a Google less shy about transforming the web into raw material for its AIs. Search will become (even more) a souped-up ChatGPT, and also the checkout counter for every online store, and YouTube will use video clips to create answer pages. Notice that in all these announcements, Google/YouTube transforms itself into a curator and interface for web content, without attribution or with minimal credit given. You won’t visit websites anymore; you’ll visit Google — and you’ll stay there. On the flip side, whoever calls themselves a “content creator” is actually a content supplier for platforms. It’s always been that way for Meta (Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube; now it’s also the case for Google, even if unintentionally (myself included!). All of this amounts to a complete betrayal of everything Google once stood for (and was) back then. Maybe people like this new incarnation because the web, poor thing, has long suffered…