Google recently announced plans to deploy Bard, its artificial-intelligence chatbot that it claims will help users find the information they need to live better lives.

Along the way, the search-engine giant is going to kill the Web.

As someone who works in digital journalism, I have a clear interest in readers being able to, you know, find news content. Even as a human, I have an interest in the open, interconnected nature of the Web remaining just that: open and connected.

Google’s plans for Bard will ruin that.

Let’s take a step back and review the origins of the World Wide Web. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the internet, but in 1990 he created the Web, which brought the internet to the masses. Once he did that, websites exploded in popularity and the main way to gain visibility (and readers) was to link to other sites that shared your interest.

Anyone remember the term “webring“?

Then, in 1998, along came Google, which reinvented the search engine. It made finding information much easier (and faster), but the basic premise of the Web — linking to other sites for both ease of use and credibility — still held.

It still holds to this day, but I don’t want to get too far ahead.

After Facebook in particular and social media in general came on the scene, things started to change. Facebook tried to bill itself as a great uniter, but in reality it was — and continues to be — a walled garden. Its mission was antithetical to the how the Web works (or is supposed to work, anyway). Instead of connecting users to different websites that they can explore, Facebook’s business model depends on users staying on the platform, digesting content and feeding its algorithms with their likes and dislikes.

It’s great for spreading disinformation, dismantling democracy and generating ad revenue, but a lousy system for improving human connection.

And now, I fear, Google is turning into the same walled garden.

Laura Hazard Owen at the Neiman Journalism Lab has an excellent piece on what Google’s AI-driven search means for publishers. Simply put, it will result in fewer people clicking on links if Google simply serves up the information on its own platform. In addition to the danger inherent in redefining (or, let’s face it, killing) the Web, this move to AI-generated search results will almost certainly aggravate the omnipresent dangers of misinformation.

Yes, Bard has a disclaimer (as do ChatGPT and other text-generating AI bots) that the information it serves isn’t necessarily accurate. But what is the point, then of a search engine where the reliability of it is a coin flip?

To illustrate: I recently asked Bard to list the top 10 news events in Reading, Pa., from the last decade. I won’t reproduce the results here because I don’t want to perpetuate misinformation, but I’ll summarize them:

Two of the items had the wrong dates for the events mentioned. At least one gave a local summary of a national issue, but got some of the details completely wrong.

Others were completely fictional, including a false report of a 2012 fire in the Reading Eagle newspaper building that lasted for several days.

No such event took place. The story that this item linked to was a Reading Eagle story of a factory explosion, not a fire, that happened in 2023. So if a reader sees that item in Bard and clicks on the story for more information, they’ll see that Bard got it wrong. But what if they don’t?

At least two of the 10 items were complete fabrications, and not linked to anything. So an unsuspecting reader would easily be led to believe what Bard told them. And with no links to verify or refute the information, the user is screwed.

One of the ten items was somewhat accurate, although it was written so vaguely it reads like Bard was called to the front of the class to give a report on a book it hadn’t read:

The COVID-19 pandemic (2020-present). The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on Reading, as it has on cities all over the world. The pandemic has caused widespread economic hardship and social disruption, and it has claimed the lives of hundreds of people in the city.

It may be that AI will have beneficial applications that will improve humanity. But right now, I worry that it’s going to kill the World Wide Web, and lead us further into the dystopian future of nothing but walled gardens online.

At least we still have Wikipedia.