AI Broke the Web’s Social Contract, w/ Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium
How AI broke the web's social contract and potential solutions for publishers.
Guest
Tony Stubblebine
CEO, Medium
Tony Stubblebine is CEO of Medium, the publishing platform. He has written about the changing relationship among writers, publishers, platforms, and AI systems, including questions of consent, credit, compensation, crawling, and discovery. His work focuses on sustaining an open publishing ecosystem while adapting to generative AI.
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What happens when AI can “read the whole internet” but the internet stops volunteering its best work?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, about what he calls AI’s “broken social contract” with the web, and why the next era may be less about a “dead internet” and more about a dead public internet.
We unpack the incentives that made the open web thrive, how AI search summaries change the traffic bargain, and what a realistic path forward could look like for publishers, platforms, and writers.
Key topics we cover:
-Why generative AI broke the web’s old value exchange, and what “social contract” means in practical terms (00:03:24)
-Tony’s “three Cs” framework for a healthier AI ecosystem: consent, credit, compensation (00:05:13)
-The publisher response spectrum: blocking crawlers, fighting spam/slop, and what happens if collaboration fails (00:04:25)
-The shift from public publishing to private communities (Discords, group chats, newsletters) and what drives that retreat (00:07:06)
-How AI search summaries can cut the incentive to publish publicly by reducing click-through and traffic (00:08:21)
-Why AI systems still depend on human source material, and what happens when the best content moves behind “closed doors” (00:09:27)
-Cloudflare’s role in the escalating crawler arms race, including large-scale blocking and other countermeasures (00:16:48)
-A proposed solution: an internet-wide licensing standard instead of one-off deals, including the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) approach (00:18:07)
-What “paying creators” could look like in practice, including opt-in/opt-out controls and better transparency for writers (00:19:33)
-“Dead internet theory” vs. the more plausible outcome: a dead public internet, and why Tony is cautiously optimistic about a new equilibrium (00:23:06)
-The “second wave” of AI: moving from replacement to augmentation, and how Medium is thinking about AI tools that support flow state rather than write for you (00:26:03)
-Why AI detectors don’t solve the problem, and why Medium focuses on quality and reader value as the enforceable standard (00:34:04)
-Advice for writers: the difference between the creator economy and the “expert economy,” and what’s likely to be more sustainable (00:38:43)
-Tony’s prediction: “trust but verify” becomes the balance point, and the web finds an equilibrium because AI can’t function without public sources (00:43:27)