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About 28 years ago, I was reporting\u00a0a story from my desk at Wired titled \u201cThe Hot New Medium Is \u2026 Email.\u201d This was an unusually personal report because I was partly its subject \u2014 a creator of a then-novel phenomenon: the viral internet newsletter. Think Substack circa 1995, made by hand, when maybe there were only 16 million people on the internet.<\/p>\n
As I explained to Wired readers back in the day: \u201cMeme is my newsletter, delivered once a month via electronic mail to 4,400 subscribers\u2026 What counts is who reads it.\u201d I was, in today\u2019s language, an early influencer. The early internet offered \u201can idealized picture\u201d where \u201cideas flow freely\u201d \u2014 and I desperately wanted to believe it could work.<\/p>\n
What began as a land of artisanal knowledge-makers cultivating gardens of wisdom became an industrial farming operation powered by social media platforms.\u00a0On the internet of 2026, people speak of \u201cinfobesity\u201d \u2014 gorged on processed information from unknown sources, an intellectual abattoir where bits of everything are thrown together with one purpose: to hook us on the feed. We know it\u2019s bad for us. We can\u2019t put it down.<\/p>\n
In this slurry of addictive information, people craved the authentic \u2014 and influencer culture emerged as a tonic. Here were native guides doing the research for us, helping us make sense of the low-stakes (handbags, smoothies) and increasingly the high-stakes: longevity, retirement, parenting. Yet as with so much that starts as sincere human-to-human connection online, the higher the stakes, the more conflicted the influencer\u2019s role became. Is it entertainment or discernment?<\/p>\n
In spring 2020, it became a survival technology.\u00a0A terrifying pandemic with no vaccine and no easy explanations sent millions of us to our screens for answers. Into this panicked information vacuum stepped people with charisma \u2014 \u201crizz\u201d \u2014 who did their own research on COVID and taught us, maybe, how we could survive. Distrust of expertise became the feature, not the bug.<\/p>\n
Into this landscape, ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022, famously becoming the fastest product to reach 100 million people. Now the power to \u201cdo my own damn research\u201d reached new heights. More information processed by machines whose provenance was even more mysterious than that of an influencer. A synthetic persona \u2014 a machine influencer \u2014 could now compete with the human influencer, feeding more processed intelligence into already-processed intelligence. It came to be known, aptly, as \u201cAI slop.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Suspicion Didn\u2019t Land on AI Alone<\/p>\n
The human in the loop didn\u2019t diminish in principle.\u00a0AI just poured gasoline on an already-burning fire. When the provenance of everything online became suspect, the suspicion spread to everyone \u2014 influencers included. \u201cHow do I know you know what you\u2019re talking about?\u201d became the question directed at every voice online. When it came to health, wealth, and love, rizz was increasingly insufficient to carry the day.<\/p>\n
What is your credential to tell me how to parent? What gives you the authority to advise me on my GLP-1 shots? What do you really know about the use of psychedelics to treat trauma?<\/p>\n
Expertise Is Becoming the Scarcest Resource Online<\/p>\n
The wheel is turning back toward expertise \u2014 credentialed professionals with original, hard-won knowledge, not merely fast and fabulous opinion.\u00a0But with a twist: AI can now powerfully augment that expertise. Imagine world-class experts pairing their lifetime of knowledge with a custom AI trained exclusively on their know-how \u2014 the juicy stuff never put online for the big models to scrape. Think of this as \u201cWhole Knowledge\u201d \u2014 like a whole food, spiky bits and all, with real provenance. The intellectual terroir of a human mind, made available to those who need it most.<\/p>\n
In this realm, the role of the charismatic influencer bifurcates. Where the stakes are low \u2014 fashion, travel, where no one is likely to die from misinformation \u2014 it will remain entertaining to follow an influencer. Where the stakes are high \u2014 illness, money \u2014 rizz won\u2019t carry the day. Experts holding a world-class asset \u2014 their proprietary lifetime knowledge \u2014 will find themselves in a privileged position. No longer constrained by the physical limits of their daily schedule, they can scale their wisdom in ways previously unimaginable.<\/p>\n
Already, smaller AI models trained on a narrower body of knowledge \u2014 a clinician\u2019s lifetime of writing and speaking, for instance \u2014 are outperforming frontier models on domain-specific tasks.\u00a0Smaller models also enable something anathema to the frontier model: a distinct voice and perspective. The public appears ready for this change \u2014 a recent Gartner study found that half of consumers now actively prefer companies that avoid generative AI in their marketing.<\/p>\n
Take Dr. Becky Kennedy, the clinical psychologist who became the parenting whisperer to an entire millennial generation.\u00a0Kennedy recently announced she had sold over 100,000 subscriptions to her Good Inside platform \u2014 which includes 24\/7 access to an AI model trained exclusively on her knowledge \u2014 grossing $34 million last year.\u00a0She raised a reported $10 million to make it possible.<\/p>\n
The point is not to automate human connection. It is to rebuild trust in a world where trust has been broken.\u00a0When synthetic slop makes the illusion of expertise free, the value of genuine, verifiable wisdom skyrockets.\u00a0We are moving out of an era where technology rewarded those who captured the most attention, and into an era where technology scales those who hold the deepest knowledge.<\/p>\n
In my 1998 Wired piece, I wrote that the internet was a place where \u201cpower comes not from wealth, but from thought.\u201d\u00a0In 2026, that idea\u2019s time may have finally arrived.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of\u00a0Fortune.<\/p>\n
#internets #influencers #killed #category #created<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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