The entire Internet is reverting to "beta" mode

The AI takeover is changing everything about the web—and not necessarily for the better.

Excerpt: "A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology.

Even without actively seeking out a chatbot, billions of people are now pushed to interact with AI when searching the web, checking their email, using social media, and online shopping. Ninety-two percent of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI products, universities are providing free chatbot access to potentially millions of students, and U.S. national-intelligence agencies aredeploying AI programs across their workflows.

When ChatGPT went down for several hours last week, everyday users, students with exams, and office workers posted in despair: “If it doesnt come back soon my boss is gonna start asking why I havent done anything all day,” one person commented on Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages. “I have an interview tomorrow for a position I know practically nothing about, who will coach me??” wrote another. That same day—June 10, 2025—a Google AI overview told me the date was June 18, 2024.

For all their promise, these tools are still … janky. At the start of the AI boom, there were plenty of train wrecks—Bing’s chatbot telling a tech columnist to leave his wife, ChatGPT espousing overt racism—but these were plausibly passed off as early-stage bugs. Today, though the overall quality of generative-AI products has improved dramatically, subtle errors persist: the wrong date, incorrect math, fake books and quotes. Google Search now bombards users with AI overviews above the actual search results or a reliable Wikipedia snippet; these occasionally include such errors, a problem that Google warns about in a disclaimer beneath each overview. Facebook, Instagram, and X are awash with bots and AI-generated slop. Amazon is stuffed with AI-generated scam products. Earlier this year, Apple disabled AI-generated news alerts after the feature inaccurately summarized multiple headlines. Meanwhile, outages like last week’s ChatGPT brownout are not uncommon.

Digital services and products were, of course, never perfect. Google Search already has lots of unhelpful advertisements, while social-media algorithms have amplified radicalizing misinformation. But as basic services for finding information or connecting with friends, until recently, they worked. Meanwhile, the chatbots being deployed as fixes to the old web’s failings—Google’s rush to overhaul Search with AI, Mark Zuckerberg’s absurd statement that AI can replace human friends, Elon Musk’s suggestion that his Grok chatbot can combat misinformation on X—are only exacerbating those problems while also introducing entirely new sorts of malfunctions and disasters. More important, the extent of the AI industry’s new ambitions—to rewire not just the web, but also the economy, education, and even the workings of government with a single technology—magnifies any flaw to the same scale."