Free and Open Access in the Age of Generative A.I. ⇥ citationneeded.news
Instead of worrying about “wait, not like that”, I think we need to reframe the conversation to “wait, not only like that” or “wait, not in ways that threaten open access itself”. The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.
This is such a terrific and thoughtful essay. I am suspicious of using more aggressive intellectual property laws to contain artificial intelligence companies, but there is a clear power imbalance between individuals and the businesses helping themselves to their — oh, who am I kidding? Our — work in bulk.