I was one of the internet’s first influencers. AI has just killed the entire category — and created something better

(SeaPRwire) –   Nearly three decades ago, I was writing a story from my desk at Wired titled “The Hot New Medium Is … Email.” This piece was unusually personal because I was part of its subject matter — a creator of a then-unique phenomenon: the viral online newsletter. Picture Substack circa 1995, crafted by hand, when the internet had roughly 16 million users.

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.” In today’s terms, I was an early influencer. The early internet offered “an idealized picture” where “ideas flow freely” — and I was deeply hopeful this vision could work.

What started as a space for craft-focused knowledge creators tending to gardens of insight evolved into an industrial-scale operation powered by social media platforms. By 2026, people talk about “infobesity” — being overwhelmed by processed content from unknown sources, an intellectual abattoir where fragments of everything are mixed together with one goal: to keep us hooked on the feed. We know it’s bad for us, but we can’t step away.

Amid this flood of addictive information, people craved authenticity — and influencer culture emerged as a remedy. These native guides did the research for us, helping us navigate low-stakes choices (handbags, smoothies) and increasingly high-stakes matters: longevity, retirement, parenting. Yet like many things that start as sincere human-to-human connections online, the higher the stakes, the more muddled the influencer’s role became. Is it entertainment or thoughtful discernment?

In spring 2020, it turned into a survival tool. A terrifying pandemic with no vaccine and few clear answers sent millions to their screens for guidance. Into this panicked information vacuum stepped charismatic people — those with “rizz” — who did their own COVID research and shared tips on how we might survive. Distrust of expertise became a feature, not a bug.

Against this backdrop, ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022, famously becoming the fastest product to reach 100 million users. Now the power to “do my own damn research” reached new heights. More information processed by machines whose origins were even more mysterious than an influencer’s. A synthetic persona — a machine influencer — could now compete with human influencers, feeding more processed intelligence into an already saturated pool. It was aptly named “AI slop.”

Distrust Wasn’t Limited to AI

The human role in the process didn’t diminish in principle. AI just poured gasoline on an already burning fire. When the origin of all online content became suspect, distrust spread to everyone — influencers included. “How do I know you know what you’re talking about?” became the question directed at every online voice. For health, wealth, and love, rizz was increasingly insufficient to win people over.

What qualifications do you have to guide me on parenting? What gives you the authority to advise me on my GLP-1 shots? How much do you really know about using psychedelics to treat trauma?

Expertise Is Emerging as the Rarest Online Resource

The tide is turning back to expertise — credentialed professionals with original, hard-won knowledge, not just fast and flashy opinions. But 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 — the valuable content never put online for big models to scrape. Think of this as “Whole Knowledge” — like whole food, spiky bits and all, with real provenance. The intellectual terroir of a human mind, made available to those who need it most.

In this new space, the charismatic influencer’s role splits. For low-stakes topics — fashion, travel, where misinformation won’t cause harm — following an influencer will remain entertaining. For high-stakes areas — illness, money — rizz won’t carry the day. Experts with a world-class asset — their proprietary lifetime knowledge — will find themselves in a privileged position. No longer constrained by daily schedule limits, they can scale their wisdom in ways once unimaginable.

Already, smaller AI models trained on a narrower body of knowledge — a clinician’s lifetime of writing and speaking, for example — are outperforming frontier models on domain-specific tasks. Smaller models also enable something anathema to frontier models: a distinct voice and perspective. The public seems ready for this change — a recent Gartner study found half of consumers now actively prefer companies that avoid generative AI in marketing.

Take Dr. Becky Kennedy, the clinical psychologist who became the parenting whisperer for an entire millennial generation. Kennedy recently announced she sold over 100,000 subscriptions to her Good Inside platform — which includes 24/7 access to an AI model trained exclusively on her knowledge — grossing $34 million last year. She raised a reported $10 million to make it possible.

The point isn’t to automate human connection. It’s to rebuild trust in a world where trust is broken. When synthetic slop makes fake expertise free, the value of genuine, verifiable wisdom skyrockets. We’re moving out of an era where technology rewarded those who captured the most attention, and into one where technology scales those with the deepest knowledge.

In my 1998 Wired piece, I wrote that the internet was a place where “power comes not from wealth, but from thought.” In 2026, that idea’s time may finally have arrived.