AI and Link Rot Are Eroding the Web's Collective Memory, Experts Warn

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The internet's knowledge infrastructure is deteriorating as AI systems scrape content from sources like Wikipedia without driving traffic back, starving volunteer-run platforms of the contributions needed to sustain them. The Internet Archive, which operates the Wayback Machine, faces mounting cyberattacks, legal battles, and engineering strain that threaten its ability to preserve disappearing web pages. Ephemeral content formats such as Instagram Stories and TikTok videos mean vast amounts of cultural and political communication vanish within 24 hours, leaving little historical record. The closure of data-journalism site FiveThirtyEight in early 2025 illustrates how entire archives of knowledge can be lost when major platforms shut down, breaking countless citations and references. Critics argue that AI is simultaneously accelerating this decay and becoming its own casualty, as the degrading sources it was trained on produce increasingly unreliable outputs.

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