Bookmarked The push to AI is meant to devalue the open web so we will move to web3 for compensation (by Mita Williams)

Adding this interesting perspective from Mita Williams to my notes on the effects of generative AI. She positions generative AI as bypassing the open web entirely (abstracted away into the models the AIs run on). Thus sharing is disincentivised as sharing no longer brings traffic or conversation, if it is only used as model-fodder. I’m not at all sure if that is indeed the case, but from as early as YouTube’s 2016 Flickr images database being used for AI model training, such as IBM’s 2019 facial recognition efforts, it’s been a concern. Leading to questions about whether existing (Creative Commons) licenses are fit for purpose anymore. Specifically Williams pointing to not only the impact on an individual creator but also on the level of communities they form, are part of and interact in, strikes me as worth thinking more about. The erosion of (open source, maker, collaborative etc) community structures is a whole other level of potential societal damage.

Mita Williams suggests the described erosion is not an effect but an actual aim by tech companies, part of a bait and switch. A re-siloing, an enclosing of commons, where being able to see something in return for online sharing again is the lure. Where the open web may fall by the wayside and become even more niche than it already is.

…these new systems (Google’s Bard, the new Bing, ChatGPT) are designed to bypass creators work on the web entirely as users are presented extracted text with no source. As such, these systems disincentivize creators from sharing works on the internet as they will no longer receive traffic…

Those who are currently wrecking everything that we collectively built on the internet already have the answer waiting for us: web3.

…the decimation of the existing incentive models for internet creators and communities (as flawed as they are) is not a bug: it’s a feature.

Mita Williams

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