A Melancholy Splinter Update Amidst Google’s AI Summaries Destroying the Web As We Know It

Splinter is not going anywhere, but it is changing. There will be fewer stories as we adjust to this new smaller budget forced upon us by Google stealing our traffic, and while we will continue to cover the climate crisis, Dave is irreplaceable. When we launched, I wrote that I can only write like myself, as this project would fail miserably if I tried to do a discount Hamilton Nolan routine, and the same goes for Dave Levitan. There’s no sugarcoating it, we lost a huge part of Splinter.

To be clear, this is not a sinister situation that Splinter and other sites of its ilk have gone through before. We’re not trying to maximize profitability by cutting our labor force to the bone. We’re not adding some cynical trick to get you to click on stories with no substance that you’re not interested in. We’re not going to cover the site in sponsored content or pivot to video or any of the other greedy gambits other companies have tried that haven’t worked. This move is entirely driven by financial losses, fueled by Google’s theft of traffic upending the business model the web has depended on this entire century.

We are not the first site to cut back in the face of Google’s AI summaries stealing our traffic (Fortune cut ten percent of its staff in July and cited AI summaries as the reason why), and we certainly won’t be the last. I fear that our smaller shop here is simply a harbinger of what awaits everyone in the near future, as there are an endless array of articles about this growing AI dynamic with titles like “Traffic apocalypse” and “AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?” Google is a fundamentally evil company who has done more to destroy journalism than any entity in human history, and Dave’s job is another victory they can claim in their unhinged quest to ruin the world for their own personal profit.

This is not the first time I have seen this dynamic unfold, as Google deprioritized political content in 2019, and several months later, I was out of a job as Paste Politics’ Google traffic fell dramatically thanks to one tweak by a monopoly. Driving journalists to the unemployment line is a central part of Google’s business model, and I can only assume that the soulless executives who work there are rejoicing reading this missive about how they took a chunk out of Splinter so they can lie in their AI summaries about what we wrote while ensuring that no one ever clicks on us.

The core job of a writer is to write interesting content that people enjoy reading, and on that front, Dave was a wild success. I am forever indebted to him for taking a leap of faith when I reached out to him after getting the Splinter Editor-in-Chief job, and no doubt a lot of people took a leap of faith on my far less widely known writing because of his much more familiar work appearing next to it. We were able to take a dormant website being hidden by the internet’s algorithms and turn it into a site read by hundreds of thousands of people every month, including many high-profile writers and some politicians. I can’t thank all of you enough for joining us on this ride and trusting us to break down and analyze the news of the day, and we will continue this effort, albeit on a smaller scale.

Unfortunately, in this business, writing thoughtful articles and profiting from them are two entirely different skillsets. Media is increasingly becoming a race to the bottom, encouraged even more so by Google’s new AI summaries creating something of an Armageddon for the web by giving people information that may or may not be correct without forcing them to click on a link. That a huge chunk of people have seemingly accepted these AI summaries as their new source of truth is a bleak indicator of where much of the public’s tenuous grasp on reality is headed. It’s become very clear from this mindless AI bubble that the central appeal of AI to a lot of people is giving them an excuse to shut their brains off and opt out of critical thinking altogether.

I can’t help but feel like what we’re doing here is a relic that hearkens the end of an era. Not just Splinter, but anyone writing analysis and news that people read anywhere on the internet on any subject. These AI Overviews are coming for all of us. I have all the internal data in the world showing me that the longer the article, the less likely someone is to read it, and so it really should come as no surprise that so many have accepted these AI blurbs as their new god. The problem is that eventually, if Google gets what it wants, there will be no websites remaining to steal summaries from, leaving AI left with what it’s best at: making up bullshit that isn’t real. If you read an AI Overview and don’t click on the links it provides, just know that you are helping Google in their bloodthirsty quest to usher every single writer on the internet to the unemployment line.