Most people that use the internet nowadays don't remember what it was like before Google and Facebook, i.e. before the monetization concept really existed. Back then, you provided a service and you got paid for it, and the only asymmetry in most services was the fact that you could overbook: you have 4 CPUs in your server but you sell 200 website packages limited at 1 CPU, in the knowledge that no website will utilize the entire CPU all the time.

This made place for the "free" services that are ad-driven, but ads don't pay enough, so that turned into a data harvesting operation.

AI disrupts not the ads, it disrupts the traffic, but only by capturing it. Now your data gets harvested by the AI companies: if AI is your go-to tool and you use some hosted chatbot, then instead of knowing "what you are searching for", the platform now will get a much deeper understanding: "what you are thinking".

This means that reference sites and discussion forums are getting disrupted. Search engines would too but these are all AI companies now. The disrupted places will no longer serve ads and they will no longer be able to harvest data and sell it at the scale they used to. The problem the AI companies have is that these sites are important inputs to their models, so they will at some point need to turn to chat logs as an input, which we all know is dangerous because it has a feedback loop.

Naw they don't. But to be part of our exclusive community, you do. SN disrupts not the internet, not AI, but communities.