How We Interact with AI Will Define the Next Web

We’re told the next web will be shaped by AI but that’s only half the story. The real question, the one fewer people ask, is how AI will shape us as it becomes our primary interface with the digital world. Right now, we’re outsourcing critical decisions — about identity, authenticity, and even reality — to black-box systems owned by a handful of companies. The way we interact with these systems, or rather, the way they interact with us, is not neutral but deeply political and…profoundly consequential.

Just recently, leaked documents revealed how Meta trained its large language models using vast quantities of personal user data without clear user consent, further reinforcing the concern: AI interfaces aren’t just answering questions or generating content. What they’re actually doing is quietly redefining privacy, agency, and trust. Meredith Whittaker of Signal Foundation has expressed related views on the influence of AI architectures and the concentration of power within the tech industry.​

In an interview with springerin, Whittaker discussed the limitations of transparency in AI systems, stating:​

“Without the ability to act on that information, without agency, transparency is a flex. It’s an expression of power, it is not actually an affordance that informs governance or much else.”

Additionally, in a Financial Times article, Whittaker highlighted the centralization of AI development:​

“The [AI] market is crazy right now. Seventy per cent of Series A [early-stage start-up] investment is coming from the hyperscalers, and the majority of that goes back to the hyperscalers.”

Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a compelling reframing of our common anxieties about artificial intelligence, arguing that fears of “superintelligent self-replicating AI” often mask deeper concerns about how capitalism uses technology against us. Meredith Whittaker expands on this point, emphasizing that technology fears often reflect unease about power dynamics: “I think it’s an anxiety about how technologies are deployed to control us. I am interested in whose problems technology has solved traditionally and which questions are answered with technology. And ultimately, who gets to make the decisions about what technological approaches to these problems get developed, designed, maintained, built, deployed, and used. After all, it comes back to relationships of power.”

This perspective takes the discussion from abstract fears of AI’s potential, grounding it instead in the tangible and immediate question of who controls the technology and whose interests it ultimately serves.

When Sam Altman pushes universal digital ID as the entry ticket to interact with sophisticated AI systems, he’s fundamentally altering the terms of digital participation. Identity becomes currency, and the gatekeepers are centralized corporate APIs.

The missing element in our current interaction with AI is simple but radical: user-owned context. Right now, every AI interaction is contextless, anchored only in the models’ assumptions, training data biases, and corporate interests. But what if your interactions were rooted in your own persistent identity, data, and values? What if AI adapted to you, not through invasive data harvesting but through controlled, decentralized, and transparent digital environments?

That’s exactly what makes Web3 essential to the future of AI interaction. Platforms like STR Domains and SLNN Mesh don’t aim at decentralization for its own sake only. They’re aiming at infrastructure for context: user-defined and user-owned. Your identity, your data and your rules. Instead of interacting with AI as a guest in someone else’s opaque system, you become the host. Your digital identity provides the context AI models need to interact authentically, respectfully, and transparently with you.

A structural change. AI is increasingly mediating our interactions and personal, economic, and political decisions will likely flow through these digital interfaces. If we don’t own or control the context behind these interactions, someone else will. And that control won’t simply mean shaping content; it will mean shaping beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes.

We do believe that we have the chance now, during this technological transition, to rethink our relationship with AI as active architects instead of just passive users. Of course, the future of the web will not be defined by AI alone. It will be defined by whether we insist on context, transparency, and ownership as essential foundations.

In the end, the next web will be as much about identity and sovereignty as it is about technology. How we choose to interact with AI today is slowly turning into the digital world of tomorrow.

For more information about SourceLess decentralized technology, Web3 infrastructure, STR Domains, and SLNN Mesh, visit www.sourceless.net.