How do you keep people who want to spend money on persuasion from attempting to bias the dominant search AI?
Let's take an extreme example - say Exxon decides they want to spend $1 billion on influencing society in favor of the petroleum industry. They hire 10,000 freelance content writers to write 1000 articles each at $100 a pop and flood the internet over the course of several years with (everything from subtle to blatant) pro-petroleum content (nuclear's dangerous, solar will never scale, fusion's a pipe dream, wind is ugly, great new ways of recycling plastic, microplastics are actually beneficial to the human biome, a brand new low emission engine, ...). How is the scraper that ingests knowledge for the AI supposed to weed those out? It's still SEO, just at a higher level than the current mom and pop efforts.
I completely agree that economic agents are going to try to game it at scale - it's basic human nature.
On the other hand, if people complained that Google was a black box, or that as the old marketing adage goes, "advertising spend works, I just don't know which half", this might be a whole other level.
So agents will try but I have no clue whether it will be economical or effective.
Let's take an extreme example - say Exxon decides they want to spend $1 billion on influencing society in favor of the petroleum industry. They hire 10,000 freelance content writers to write 1000 articles each at $100 a pop and flood the internet over the course of several years with (everything from subtle to blatant) pro-petroleum content (nuclear's dangerous, solar will never scale, fusion's a pipe dream, wind is ugly, great new ways of recycling plastic, microplastics are actually beneficial to the human biome, a brand new low emission engine, ...). How is the scraper that ingests knowledge for the AI supposed to weed those out? It's still SEO, just at a higher level than the current mom and pop efforts.