The Internet used to be a place where we easily had access to “free” knowledge. It was an open digital world. As we scrolled and ingested such content, there was opportunity to learn about the authors and distributors of such knowledge, which also added a possibility for them to upsell or direct our attention to other things.

Now, in the age of AI, it’s no more “X person has this awesome article about the problem and how to solve them” and more “X model can fix or teach about that”. No author, no references, nothing… It’s brutal! This will cause, and has caused already, businesses to lose revenue. Worst, or equally worst, is that open core businesses (to speak in a topic closer to my heart as an engineer) that depend on such revenue to fund constant work on their open source projects that everybody else can freely use, will stop maintaining it because it’s no longer viable.

I’m very concerned that this can push such businesses or individual maintainers to close access to, for example, documentation (at least anything beyond the basics of what it is and how to install it) in favor of taking back control and to have new ways to publicize other work and direct attention. At the very least, to be known…

This will throw us back 30+ years, when if we wanted knowledge we would have to buy books. And this would starve the models of training data, eventually, which would also make them less interesting. So it’s extremely evident to me that AI models, and their owners, need to at least make ways for authors to have a little more control or take crediting way more seriously!