Roger J. Kreuz, U. Memphis
How will the internet evolve in the coming decades? Fiction writers have speculated on this question for years. In his 2019 novel Fall, Neal Stephenson imagined a near-future internet saturated with misinformation, disinformation, and advertising—rendering it almost unusable. To cope, characters subscribe to “edit streams,” curated news and information for those who can afford it, leaving most of humanity consuming low-quality, uncurated content.
This dystopian vision is not far off. Today, many news organizations, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their content behind paywalls, while misinformation proliferates on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
Stephenson’s ability to predict future technologies is remarkable; his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” envisioned the metaverse, and his 1995 “The Diamond Age” featured an interactive primer akin to modern chatbots.
Chatbots, however, may exacerbate the very problems they appear to solve. By dispensing factual content, they seem poised to combat misinformation. Ironically, their proliferation may pose the greatest threat to the internet’s future—an issue eerily presaged by Jorge Luis Borges in a story written over eight decades ago.
Today’s internet still contains a significant amount of high-quality, factual content: peer-reviewed articles, fact-checked reports, and vetted books. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini rely on this resource for training. However, the internet’s reservoir of high-quality text is finite. As tech companies exhaust easily accessible sources, they’re striking deals with publishers to feed their LLMs. Experts predict a critical shortage of new, high-quality training data as early as 2026.
Compounding this issue is the pollution of the web with chatbot-generated content. As these AI tools regurgitate and reprocess existing text—complete with errors, hallucinations, and fabrications—the quality of online content degrades further. This creates a feedback loop, where flawed AI outputs are fed back into the system, amplifying inaccuracies over time.
This risk isn’t hypothetical. In 2016, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot became a cautionary tale after it began parroting racist and sexist content it encountered online. Left unchecked, such degradation could render the web less trustworthy and usable. Moreover, AI trained on increasingly poor-quality data may itself become unreliable, exacerbating the problem further.
Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel” foreshadowed this dilemma. Decades before the internet’s invention, Borges imagined an infinite library containing every possible permutation of letters. This hypothetical library holds all knowledge—alongside an overwhelming sea of gibberish. The inhabitants’ initial excitement turns to despair as they realize meaningful texts are nearly impossible to locate. Even when they find coherent fragments, they cannot distinguish truths from lies.
The parallels to the internet are striking. With chatbots churning out vast quantities of low-quality text, the digital realm could become a labyrinth of misinformation, where finding reliable information is as futile as searching Borges’ library for truth.
Will the internet devolve into a polluted wasteland, accessible only to those who can afford curated content? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information becomes a Herculean task?
Often heralded as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the internet’s future depends on thoughtful stewardship. Without deliberate action to manage and maintain it, Borges’ dystopian vision may become our reality. [Abridged]
Roger J. Kreuz, U. Memphis
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