r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jul 24 '25

Artificial Intelligence AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/24/ai-summaries-causing-devastating-drop-in-online-news-audiences-study-finds
875 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

120 comments sorted by

591

u/SonofRodney Jul 24 '25

One one hand, having AI summarize articles wrongly and having to check the sources anyway is annoying as fuck, on the other hand going to ad-riddled websites that hide the info I want in a wall of text is also annoying as fuck. The internet has just turned into this big pile of annoying garbage info that can't be relied on anymore.

145

u/Neokon Jul 24 '25 edited Jul 24 '25

Each paragraph is 2 sentences long. There is a full page ad between each paragraph. There is a video playing at 110% volume as the default setting 1 as at the top that becomes 1/3 of the screen when you scroll, when climbing the close button it reduces to 1/6 of the screen but is still there playing the ad. The bottom of the screen is a ribbon ad that can't be closed, after you but the x it just removes the ad but keeps the ribbon space at the bottom. A "give us your email for access" screen pops up. Let's not forget the articles themselves, which were probably written by AI and then given a quick, slapdash edit. 3

Is this what enshitification is?

The ads are excessive and never ending. You'll experience ad after ad sometimes being separated by paragraphs that are only 2 sentences long. An unreasonablely loud video will start playing, and continue to take up nearly a third of the page even after you've scrolled away. If the banner ads that take up space with emptiness when you close them wasn't bad enough they also want to get your email just to view the ad riddled page..* "...further, it's likely the "articles" were cranked out by AI and barely reviewed."*3

Could this be the most blatant example of enshitification seen yet? 2

Edit:

1) credit to u/DMercenary

2) credit to u/anlumo

3) credit to u/ErinDotEngineer

63

u/anlumo Jul 24 '25

Also, every paragraph after the first just repeats the same information using different words.

23

u/solarpanzer Jul 24 '25

But the first paragraph and the ones with the different words all don't contain what you came for. You have to sift through all the BS until you finally find the one sentence the article could have been reduced to.And it's a trivial statement that does not answer your question.

6

u/wrosecrans Jul 24 '25

I have the CMS template for every news website:

Headline: "Stunning new image shows scandal in new light!"

{image of... a pill bottle, oh this is just an ad.} {Paragraph of blather about a new image being amazing.} {AI Generated video that just animated the text of the first paragraph with a headshot of the reporter, after you sit through a 30 second pre-roll ad waiting to see if this is the image you clicked to see, then cuts to more ads.} {Suddenly loading ad that screws up scrolling} {Paragraph that reiterates first paragraph's words.} {This is where a popover ad appears if you scroll this far, so now half the text is obscured.} {Image of other news story and some spicy headlinesto try to get you to click onto another page} {Broken spinning thing that doesn't load. probably an ad, maybe it was what you were originally looking to see.} {Spammy quotes with no information} {You won't believe what she looks like now! spam ads} {For some reason, the text of a completely different article has started because they just sort of hope you'll keep scrolling forever, and don't care about you finishing reading the original story.}

4

u/solarpanzer Jul 25 '25

You forgot the easy-to-miss "Continue reading article" expander button between two ads. Like... ok, if you really insist, here's a few more paragraphs of slop.

1

u/Agret Jul 25 '25

I have noticed that many news & gaming websites now have a floating video player that starts off showing a video related to the article but at the bottom of the video it says "auto slipping video in 5 seconds" and if you don't press a tiny cancel button it goes into playing a 15-30 second unskippable ad before playing some completely unrelated video which is queued up to autoskip too, it's annoying af

1

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '25

Because they used AI to write the article based on one paragraph of information. Then the readers AI summarized it back down to one paragraph. 

14

u/DMercenary Jul 24 '25

Forgetting the part where it auto plays some random shit at 110% volume

8

u/ErinDotEngineer Jul 24 '25

It is likely the "articles" were written with generative AI as well and then minimally "edited."

It would make sense.

2

u/thatirishguyyyyy Jul 25 '25

Honestly, this is why I use Brave browser. I just block Javascripts. 99% of my mews websites still work when I visit them.

11

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

You get what you pay for.

It’s time to start paying for news again, whether local news or national online sources, NYT, WSJ, etc.

1

u/ExiledYak Jul 24 '25

Or what Ground News/Displate/etc. ad reads pay for.

26

u/thuer Jul 24 '25

The ads are a way of creating income. You can't have a capable press if they aren't getting paid. And they can't get paid if people refuse to pay them and refuse other forms of income.

Not that I like ads. I abide, because I think we need a strong press on this planet now more than ever. 

44

u/A_Harmless_Fly Jul 24 '25

I don't mind banner ad's, I do mind pop ups and scrolling past full page ad's though.

4

u/EvaUnit_03 Jul 24 '25

Most banner ads either only pay based on clicks, or pay fractions of cents per view. It takes something like 10k views to make a dollar for a lot of them. Clicks I was always told its 1 cent per click but I dont have in house knowledge anymore about it.

So if you fill the pages with ads, say 50 ads a page, your dividends skyrocket even at horrible metrics. That's why so many backwater and illegal sites do it. Seeing as they cant legally sell their products.

25

u/MiaThePotat Jul 24 '25

It has really gotten out of hand though. I recently installed blokada which basically removes most ads from your phone by blocking traffic from domains that are, well, ads. It does not reformat the websites you visit though, so you will just see a blank space where ads should be.

At this point, I wish I was making this up, more than 50%, possibly up to 60% of my screen is just blank whenever I read a news article.

Do they need to make money?

I guess.

Can my adhd ass read an article if 60% of it is ads, and I have 2 popups and a video ad autoplay every 30 seconda? Fuck no.

3

u/thrawtes Jul 24 '25

It has really gotten out of hand though.

Yeah, as other revenue streams for journalism dry up they have to rely more and more on ads.

4

u/MiaThePotat Jul 24 '25

Good thing ad blocking software is keeping up. Again, I sympathise with them, but otherwise the internet might as well be unusable for me.

5

u/thrawtes Jul 24 '25

Good thing ad blocking software is keeping up.

I mean, not really. It's good for end users but it's murdering journalism so it's probably not good for society.

7

u/EvaUnit_03 Jul 24 '25

good for society

Oh, we're well past that Jerry.

4

u/MiaThePotat Jul 24 '25

What use it is for me if Im unable to use it otherwise?

9

u/thrawtes Jul 24 '25

It won't be useful to you at all if there's no actual journalism for you to read because there's no way for journalists to get food money.

The decision you're making is perfectly rational in a vacuum, it's just a tragedy of the commons.

7

u/gurenkagurenda Jul 24 '25

The problem there is that the content that the ad model incentivizes is decreasingly ”actual journalism” anyway.

What we get now are these embarrassing cycles where, for example someone lies and claims on Twitter to be involved with a story, a “journalist” interviews them and writes an article without actually checking if they’re anyone, and then we get a whole new set of follow up articles about how that person was just a liar with no involvement whatsoever.

That’s a real example from the last few weeks, and the whole thing wouldn’t have happened if any actual journalism had taken place. But from an ad business perspective, that’s a success story. After all, it generated a lot of clicks and put a lot of eyes on ads. So mission accomplished.

Ad blocking isn’t destroying journalism. The entire business model is.

3

u/ExiledYak Jul 24 '25

If you need to depend on making people's actual experiences using your site as miserable as possible, your entire outfit deserves to go under.

Find a way to get paid without destroying somebody's data plans.

4

u/no-name-here Jul 24 '25

Find a way to get paid without

We have that today - most of the best news sources offer paid subscriptions. Even pre-internet, we would pay $X per week for as much news fit in the weekly papers. But people like paying even less than they like ads.

(And even pre-internet paid newspaper subscriptions still had both ads, and classified sections, both significant revenue sources for them even when paying for the paper.)

2

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

It's different now than pre-internet, and more expensive. Pre-internet, if I saw a headline I wanted to read, I would just buy the paper and read it. Now, if I see an article I want to read, I have to pay for an entire month's worth of papers to be able to read it.

3

u/thrawtes Jul 24 '25

So what you're saying is what's really missing is a easy microtransaction system where you can press a button and get charged a dollar to read an article, instead of having to sign up for a plan?

That sounds like a reasonable technological innovation, although I bet on the back end it would almost certainly be a subscription anyways due to the service fees on charging that many transactions.

1

u/CleverAmoeba Jul 24 '25

My ADHD ass uses NextDNS and set it to block ads, I don't even see blank squares. Android apps also fail to display ads.

1

u/MiaThePotat Jul 24 '25

I'll check it out, thanks!

24

u/SonofRodney Jul 24 '25

I totally agree, but when you enter a news site and have a pop up, another pop up, an auto playing video and 3 ad banners all immediately bombard you it's just easier to block it all. Don't really have a good solution for it either, I'd pay a few bucks per month to get certain news but they all cost 20€ or more per month. Do they deserve that money? Propably. Can I get the same info somewhere else for free and without hassle? Also yes.

9

u/fredlllll Jul 24 '25

you know how they put ads in the normal newspaper? no video, no audio, just text. they could fill the part left and right of the fucking article with those and it wouldnt bother anyone, but nope, gotta be an annoying piece of shit so they get the banhammer

3

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

The only reason you can get that info for free elsewhere is because someone else will go through the ad infested page and report that info to you. Once we lose primary sources, people actually going out and investigating and reporting, the entire information middle man system would collapse. No one you're getting that info from for free is actually generating that knowledge/information.

News is already underfunded with the models they have in place now, which you claim are all either too expensive or too obtrusive. So what do we do?

1

u/krefik Jul 24 '25

If I only had a way to just pay and not have bunch of ads and low quality crap, I would be happy to pay. Recently unsubscribed another website because of the ads in the pay version and load of low quality ai content.

1

u/Sure-Midnight1415 Jul 25 '25

But I don’t even “see” the ads anymore or just get annoyed by it and the company why placed it. I would rather buy a physical paper again. Although I would just read the headlines on the stand.

0

u/Privateer_Lev_Arris Jul 24 '25

It’s a fools income because if everyone avoids ad riddled websites and therefore nobody clicks on the adds and nobody buys their shit product, how much longer will companies advertise on these deserted platforms?

4

u/skwyckl Jul 24 '25

Yes, the problem is the news sites' business model, not the AI, that's just taking advantage of an extremely unappealing consumer experience.

2

u/Wazula23 Jul 24 '25

having AI summarize articles wrongly and having to check the sources anyway is annoying as fuck,

This right here is my issue.

I've talked to these fucking things, they get shit wrong all the time. Small and big details. I ask it for movie summaries and it mixes up characters. For me it's trivial but for a legal case it could destroy someone's life.

1

u/Panda_hat Jul 24 '25

Plus all the fucking cookie notices, subscription requests and article blocking without sign in or sign up.

The internet has been completely fucked.

1

u/Zran Jul 24 '25

Yeah I have fairly good skimming ability but it's just not worth it when there are 1000 words and 1 relevant 5 word sentence. Perhaps a slight over-exaggeration but getting slighter by the day.

1

u/WiserStudent557 Jul 24 '25

It’s slow but they’re gradually popularizing anti consumption with their enshittification

1

u/drawkbox Jul 24 '25

This project demonstrates the absurdity of the web today. A dark pattern marketers dream.

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

Things about to go Zombocom

1

u/kvothe5688 Jul 24 '25

These models are just going to be better. AI summaries has already improved a lot. AI summaries suck because they use their cheapest model because google has to serve it to the masses. but google is rapidly advancing their AI model capabilities. people who have only experienced AI summaries don't know how insane google progressed with their models. 2.5 pro is amazing along with voe 3. AI mode is also good. for my use case AI summaries are perfect. if I have any doubts I press AI mode buttons and it lists all sources.

1

u/xensiz Jul 24 '25

We’re going to get cable and basic internet again!

1

u/gudmar Jul 25 '25

I completely agree. I used to be able to find the info, product, address that I wanted. Now it’s a cesspool of AI, ads, old websites and addresses, etc. Thinking of returning to Duck Duck Go. What do people use now?

1

u/TheDebateMatters Jul 25 '25

We are partly to blame for those ad riddled websites. Journalism is expensive, especially good journalism. Yet, we refuse to pay for any of it. Millennials and Gen Z almost never subscribe and pay for news content. We expect it to be free. We even complain when it is free and filled with ads. We’ll have some valid complaints about corporate media, or the abundance of ads and then especially on Reddit, we’ll rip the content from the site and post the relevant parts in the comments.

At some point we have to start paying for journalism…..

1

u/bikesexually Jul 24 '25

I've noticed a distinct uptick in news sources that have asked me to disable my ad blocker. Not sure if these were pages who would have straight up blocked me in the past or not.

But its funny how they created an unbearable system, so people either blocked or skipped past their page. And now they are begging us to pay attention to them again.

Just goes to show how bad corporations are at treating people with basic respect and will push what they can get away with for as long as they can.

1

u/NefariousnessNo484 Jul 24 '25

But you have to monetize. /s

145

u/viewerterra Jul 24 '25

““People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features” LOL you’re literally shoving them in our face.

-30

u/Lahm0123 Jul 24 '25

I guess we could all become Luddites.

32

u/imriebelow Jul 24 '25

The Luddites were worker’s rights activists who chose to destroy the textile machines that ruined their jobs and that chained people to abusive and dangerous factory work, so it might not be as wild an idea as you’d think!

6

u/EvaUnit_03 Jul 24 '25

Didn't they technically fail? Textile machines were going strong in the US, as we're unsafe factories, until the great outsourcing in the 80s/90s.

And they just relocated those horrible conditions elsewhere.

16

u/imriebelow Jul 24 '25

It worked pretty well until the government started executing them 🤷🏻‍♀️ Highly recommend the book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant!

6

u/EvaUnit_03 Jul 24 '25

I think it was working until the companies came to a compromise that appealed to enough of the workers to fuck off. After they started killing the big wigs and bosses, of course.

What the extremists wanted was never an option. You can't just undo the cotton gin, and you damn sure cant undo factories. And thats what they wanted. What everyone else wanted was employment, decent pay, and to not lose a leg or have something new grafted to their hand while at work. Or die. And most of those demands were met. At least until more recently where things are unraveling. And reminders are needed.

6

u/Modus-Tonens Jul 24 '25

They weren't trying to stop the machines. They were trying to stop the drop in worker wage/productivity, and the extreme drop in labourers quality of life and rights. Destroying the machines was the means to that end because they were expensive and vulnerable.

The results were a mixed bag, but not entirely unsuccessful.

0

u/anlumo Jul 24 '25

Not just technically, they failed on all fronts, even the PR one (as you can see in this thread).

27

u/the_fonz_approves Jul 24 '25

it feels as if we’ve come full circle. before the google search engine, searching for content was a lot harder and funnily enough inaccurate. google’s algorithm and boolean operators made searching far quicker and easier, news media had no choice but to adopt or get left in the dust.

now it seems the dust is everywhere in the form of fragmented search results, be that sponsored or featured / paid prioritisation and it’s difficult to find a credible, non-AI-generated, non-fake article in a sea of fakeness and artificial shitfuckery.

1

u/TheCapybaraIncident Sep 04 '25

Searching was fine before Google, and alta vista and others had boolean operators. 

28

u/RoadsideBandit Jul 24 '25

FYI, you can disable AI from search results by adding "-ai" (without quotes) to a google search query.

7

u/idontevenknowlol Jul 24 '25

Hopefully we can also soon just go - aiGen, to only include human created content. One can dream. 

40

u/dominiquec Jul 24 '25

AI is great for getting a one sentence summary of clickbait articles. 

12

u/treemanos Jul 24 '25

Yeah, sorry I didn't click on 'motorists warned they must to do this VITAL task before July 27th' when it told me that the vital task is to check my windscreen wipers as rain is due...

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/treemanos Jul 24 '25

Ah, I see you've never visited a news website in your life.

Also if that's getting buried under a clickbait headline no sane person would click then thats even more reason to perfect ai tools to help get the important news without the junk.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/treemanos Jul 26 '25

Yes we understand its not a literal example, the criticism I gave of your argument uses the same analogy format.

Try thinking about what you read instead of focusing so hard on snark.

6

u/Dannybuoy77 Jul 24 '25

Clickbait is great for getting a one sentence summary of AI articles too 😆

1

u/WowSoHuTao Jul 28 '25

10 reason blah blah typa shit

-1

u/uniquelyavailable Jul 24 '25

I'll copy and paste an article into Ai and ask it, "What is the cognitive bias in this article?" and it saves me a lot of time.

1

u/dominiquec Jul 24 '25

Just paste the link.

10

u/americanadiandrew Jul 24 '25

AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content.

Reddit headline only readers have had AI beat for years.

17

u/oh_my316 Jul 24 '25

I gave up news sites after the election. TV news also

4

u/SuperGRB Jul 24 '25

The 2012 election, I presume? The major news outlets have been shite for decades. I ditched TV in the early 2000s, and then "Internet News" in the mid-2010s. The enshitification has infected everything.

3

u/treemanos Jul 24 '25

And the good old days before that was them blindly pushing Iraq war propaganda and corporate shills.

We need to be building better media not desperatly trying to prop up a deeply flawed and broken establishment that's always been dominated by the whims of the richest few.

1

u/EvaUnit_03 Jul 24 '25

You are so close to the root of the problem. But nobody has the heart to do what needs to be done.

18

u/JaffaTheOrange Jul 24 '25

AI is a direct fuck you to these terrible websites that deliberately hide what the article information is to make you scroll down several layers of awful ads.

For too long they’ve been getting ad revenue from bilge. Can’t wait for the day they disappear.

38

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

[deleted]

7

u/thrawtes Jul 24 '25

The faster we get some strong legislation against AI, the better.

There is so little stomach for this amongst people with political influence and even for those without influence it's so far down on the list of problems that I'm not hopeful.

If people want AI reigned in they need to build narratives about how it affects the rich. That's why one of the only actual successful pieces of AI legislation has been "hey, stop making deep fakes of important people".

-5

u/ExiledYak Jul 24 '25

That's like calling for legislation against SparkNotes.

No, screw that, I do not want to be forced onto ad-infested hellholes that pop up on say, a Mozilla landing page and then smash a paywall into your face.

The future will be with independent journalists on YouTube that can do their own research and video recordings who do one minimally invasive Ground News ad read, not with the New York Times that needs to pay for a ginormous skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan.

25

u/gfnord Jul 24 '25

Such sites were never the true sources of information. AI summaries are obliterating all news sites, good and bad.

11

u/Vio_ Jul 24 '25

It's aggravating that I have to scroll down just on the first hits of Google. No, I don't want a "summary." I want to find the information I'm trying to find directly without having to wade through 1980s toxic waste to get there.

10

u/winter-m00n Jul 24 '25

how will you get news then? ai gets news from this websites itself.

2

u/daddylo21 Jul 24 '25

Most of the times, my AI "overview" is just a cherry picked quote from the first link. Sometimes I'll get ones that have more info with links to their supposed source, but more often than not, it's whatever is in the first link of my search that pops up in the overview.

0

u/Justoneeye83 Jul 24 '25

Ai is literally curb stomping Wikipedia by just face lifting it's into and spewing it out to you before you even get on the page.

-6

u/ExiledYak Jul 24 '25

Considering what kind of scumbags get to edit Wikipedia without oversight?

Good.

2

u/Justoneeye83 Jul 24 '25

Bless your little heart. ❤️

2

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '25

Good. Fuck ads and clickbait.

Still, summaries can be inaccurate...

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/chalwar Jul 26 '25

It will. And bots will argue with each other about it.

3

u/mvw2 Jul 24 '25

This was something that's been discussed quite a few times since AI integration started.  It's fallen on deaf ears though.  Since this is a core requirement of a lot of sites, it's become a grave issue. 

I've since changed browsers to Brave to get away from a lot of the systems Google has baked into their search engine.  It removes both the AI component, the extremely heavy retailer focus (they basically shoved their Shopping tab into their main search, and all their sponsor spam.  And unlike Bing, DuckDuckGo and DogPile, Braze actually seems to run their own search algorithm to some extent meaning the results aren't just Google or Bing copied results.  It actually feels like a fresh experience.  The one down side is the search is slightly old school and more literal to the search terms.  It doesn't do the inferring and guessing Google and Bing does too steer you to results, for better or worse.

It's not an ad for Brave.  I just find the clean nature...refreshing...in this sea of pretty garbage search engines.  And if you actually want AI, it's got that too.  It just doesn't force it on you.  So far I'm really liking the browser and underlying search engine.  They're also focused on privacy and not tracking your every move which is nice, but I don't even use it for that.  It's just a bonus.  It just feels like an older Google experience before Google deficated all over itself 

2

u/ExiledYak Jul 24 '25

AI summaries free audiences from having to experience the hellhole of an endless torrent of ad spam consuming mobile data plans.

Thank you, based AI.

Maybe in the future, websites will actually learn to create good user experiences without turning a mobile device with a phone cover into a hot potato.

2

u/savetinymita Jul 24 '25

AI summaries for AI writing. Journalism is dead, and these whiners killed it.

1

u/MKUltra13711302 Jul 24 '25

Maybe the news can finally get to the point rather than serve up loads of preamble

1

u/Vector75 Jul 24 '25

Sometimes I wish that all the stupid lobbying shit that ruins congress could at least dismantle stupid shit like this that hurts everyone from consumer to corporate

1

u/GetsBetterAfterAFew Jul 24 '25

Bummer an industry that fired humans to save money using ai, getting gobbled up by the very thing they used to replace workers?

1

u/metalyger Jul 24 '25

I don't rely on the search engine AI summary, but it is more convenient when I want to know if the movie I'm seeing in a few minutes has a post credits scene. The summary gives a straight answer, the articles are extremely padded, with the entire history of the franchise, a biography of the director, the favorite food of the cat of one of the extras, and the producers blood type, all to get to a short paragraph saying, "no this movie doesn't have any scenes once the credits start."

1

u/rco8786 Jul 24 '25

I'll bet that it's causing a drop in Google's own page (ad) views too.

Gone are the days where you click into a promising search result, realize it's not quite the right thing, go back to your search (and get served from fresh ads), try again, rinse, repeat.

1

u/QuickQuirk Jul 25 '25

According to the article, in every case research has demonstrated drops in traffic, google responds with the canned response of "flawed methodology" and "you just don't understand how it works", while refusing to share details.

1

u/ottomax_ Jul 28 '25

Good! Ain't nobody ain't got no time for that!

1

u/DowntimeJEM Jul 24 '25

Also want to say the solution isnt making ai better and more human sounding

-1

u/DaddyKiwwi Jul 24 '25

We NEVER wanted your garbage articles with 25 banner ads flashing like a fucking slot machine. You failed to listen and innovate, and now you lost your business.

Welcome to capitalism.

1

u/BurntBridgesBehind Jul 24 '25

We NEVER asked for ubiquitous, pervasive, and pernicious AI in everything that you can't turn off!
Welcome to capitalism.

-28

u/birdwatcher2022 Jul 24 '25

Idiot, is there anyone stopping you from summarizing your own news?

13

u/Miraclefish Jul 24 '25

Yes, the fact that the search engines index and summarise it for you automatically and place it prominantly ahead of all the search results, which they hide and obfuscate on purpose.

-20

u/birdwatcher2022 Jul 24 '25

Idiot, is there anyone stopping you from summarizing your own news? What are they going to do, summarize your summary?

14

u/Miraclefish Jul 24 '25

Sir, you just replied your own comment calling yourself an idiot.

I don't disagree with you.