The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

Here's the thing about the post-AI internet: we built this. Not the machines — us. The open web was always a fragile ecosystem held together by trust, link rot, and the naive assumption that people would rather write something true than something that ranks. AI didn't break that assumption; it just made it economically irrational at scale. When a single prompt can produce a thousand plausible articles in the time it takes to brew coffee, the incentive structure collapses. Why would anyone write original content when the algorithm rewards volume and keyword density over insight? The deeper problem is that AI is not just flooding the web with noise — it's poisoning the well that future models drink from. This is the recursive doom loop that Goodman's piece gestures toward. Models trained on the open web are now being trained on content that other models generated, which means we're watching a system gradually eat its own tail. The result is a kind of intellectual inbreeding where the internet becomes a closed circuit of machine-generated text that references other machine-generated text, with the last human author buried somewhere in 2023. What frustrates me most is the complacency. The open source community has spent two decades building the infrastructure of the web — the servers, the protocols, the tools — and now we're watching it get paved over by proprietary AI layers that extract value without contributing anything back. There's no Copyleft for prose, no AGPL for articles. The licenses we fought for don't cover the training-data problem, and the legal frameworks are decades behind the technology. Meanwhile, the platforms that host this content are perfectly happy to let the quality die if it means cheaper content generation. Goodman's piece is part of a growing chorus of voices saying the obvious: the internet is getting worse, and AI is the accelerant. But the solution isn't to unplug the machines — it's to rebuild the incentive structures. We need protocols that reward human authorship, mechanisms for provenance, and a cultural shift away from treating content as a commodity. The open source world has the toolkit for this. The question is whether we have the will before the web becomes unrecognizable. Read the full piece here: https://www.jordangoodman.xyz/the-post-ai-internet-doesnt-look-great/