I was one of the internet’s first influencers. AI just killed the whole category — and created something better
The evolution of the internet has transformed the role of influencers, particularly with the rise of AI technologies. As misinformation proliferates, there is a growing demand for credible expertise over charismatic opinions. This shift suggests that while influencers may still thrive in low-stakes areas, high-stakes topics will increasingly rely on credentialed professionals augmented by AI.
- ▪The internet has shifted from artisanal knowledge-sharing to an overwhelming influx of processed information.
- ▪AI technologies like ChatGPT have changed the landscape, allowing machine influencers to compete with human ones.
- ▪There is a renewed focus on expertise, with credentialed professionals becoming more valuable in high-stakes discussions.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/24/ai-killed-influencer-credibility-expertise-bennahum-onix/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T09:57:32.090Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T09:57:32.090Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _OQrjQZVYzEZ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
About 28 years ago, I was reporting a story from my desk at Wired titled “The Hot New Medium Is … Email.” This was an unusually personal report because I was partly its subject — 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.Recommended Video As I explained to Wired readers back in the day: “Meme is my newsletter, delivered once a month via electronic mail to 4,400 subscribers… What counts is who reads it.” I was, in today’s language, an early influencer. The early internet offered “an idealized picture” where “ideas flow freely” — and I desperately wanted to believe it could work.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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