I think the exact opposite will happen. When I was in school, we were taught never to trust online sources, and students always rolled their eyes at teachers for being behind the times. Meanwhile, the internet slowly filled up with junk and bad information and horrible clickbait and “alternative facts”. GPT hallucinations are just the latest version of unreliable “user generated content”. And it’s going to be everywhere, and indistinguishable from any other content.

People will gladly tell you there’s so much content online and it’s so great that you don’t need college anymore (somewhat true). The internet has more facts, more knowledge, updated more often, than any written source in time. It’s just being lost in a sea of junk. Google won’t be able to keep up at indexing all the meaningless content. They won’t be able to provide meaningful search and filtering against an infinite sea of half truths and trash. And then they’ll realize they shouldn’t try, and the index will become a lot more selective.

Today, no one should trust online information. You should only trust information that genuinely would have editors and proof teams and publishers. I think this will finally swing the pendulum back to the value of publishers and gatekeepers of information.