Olivio Sarikas contrasts the dead internet theory with a web increasingly accessed by AI agents. He places synthetic images and deepfakesA deepfake is synthetic or manipulated media that uses AI to convincingly imitate a person's appearance, voice or actions. in a longer history of manipulated media, arguing that AI changes the tools without inventing deception itself. He distinguishes obviously symbolic images from realistic fabrications and emphasizes checking whether an apparent event actually occurred.
Olivio Sarikas draws on an AI traffic report to discuss the growth of automated access and its concentration in commercially valuable information. His central distinction is that traffic measures interactions with websites, not the share of content created by humans. Agents searching for travel optionsAgentic commerce uses AI agents to assist with stages of buying and selling, such as product discovery, comparison and checkout. or retrieving current information can increase machine activity without proving that meaningful human activity has disappeared.
Olivio Sarikas explores paid crawling and machine-readable licensing as possible alternatives to advertising revenue. He discusses payment-required responses and the different purposes of search, agent access and model training, arguing that licensed access could compensate publishers when information is delivered through an AI assistant. This is presented as a potential business model, rather than evidence that every crawler already pays or that licensing resolves every rights issue.
Olivio Sarikas considers a future in which some commercial information moves through databases and APIs instead of pages visited directly by people. He argues that friendship, shared experiences and community have a different value from automated information retrievalRetrieval is the process of selecting relevant stored information and returning it to an AI system for the current task.. The conclusion is a possible transformation of the web, with agents handling more transactions and questions while people continue to seek direct interaction with one another.
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