Unfortunately, I am also worried that is the case.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.