Ted Rall: Scraping the Bottom

Ted Rall discusses how AI is Scraping the Bottom

In the same way that companies like Facebook’s habit of scraping news from news websites helped drive traditional news organizations out of business, leaving Facebook with little original news to send out to its users, A.I. models are scraping websites for content, which will deny them the traffic they need to survive. Then, what will A.I. do?

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We have a fundamental contradiction over the digital commons. Content is generated by people who need money to survive in a Capitalist society. But AI needs vast amounts of freely available content to train itself in order to move up the value chain. If the AI is capturing all of the revenue, then none goes to the content creator. Eventually, this revenue starvation will cut off the very content the AI needs to survive and thrive.

Solutions include:

• Revenue sharing in which the AI pays a percentage of their income to the content creators. However, not all content creators can be identified or want to be identified.
• Universal Basic Income in which the basic needs of the content creators are taken care of by the state. In this case, revenue sharing is indirectly done through taxation of AI companies.

Unfortunately, both of these solutions leave out companies. These could be replaced by worker cooperatives in order to leverage the sharing of knowledge and skills found in companies.