Endspiel 9

Randsportarten finden in den USA nur schwer ihr Publikum, aber nun sorgt die schon länger laufende Running Man-Inszenierung mit dem offenen Web in der Hauptrolle doch für Aufmerksamkeit bei amerikanischen Tech-Journalisten:

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system. [...]

• Publishers who still share their content openly, either completely free for their audience, as advertising-supported content, or with a limited amount of content available until they ask for some form of payment, are being absolutely hammered by ill-behaved AI bots. These bots are scouring their sites for every available bit of content, scraping all of it up to feed their LLMs, and then making summaries of that content available to users — typically without consent or compensation. The deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
• LLM-based AI platforms that have trained their AI models on this content gathered without consent typically have almost no links back to the original source content, and either bury or omit credits to the original site; as a result, publishers in categories like tech media have seen their traffic crater by over 50%, with some publishers seeing drops of over 90%.
• As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible. We're seeing this already as publishers block archival sites like the Internet Archive, even though we've already seen examples where the Internet Archive was the only accurate record of content that was disappeared by authoritarians in the current administration.
• Open APIs, a building block of how developers build new experiences for users, and for how researchers understand people's behavior online, are rapidly being locked down due to abuse from LLMs, as well as the extremist CEOs not wanting anyone to understand what's happening on their platforms. The clamping down doesn't just affect coders — the people who were best poised to help monitor and translate what's been happening on platforms like Twitter have seen their work under siege, with over 60% of research projects on the platform stalled or abandoned just since Musk shut down their open API access.
• Independent media based on open formats, like podcasts, are also under siege as platforms like Apple's podcasts move to closed infrastructure which means that content creators are now required to work with Apple's approved partners. Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process. The net result will be podcasts moving from being an open format that isn't controlled by either any one company or any manipulative algorithms, to just another closed social platform monetized by surveillance-based advertising.
• Open source software projects, which power the vast majority of the internet's infrastructure, are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions being made by automated AI code agents. These submissions attempt to look like legitimate open source code contributions, and end up overwhelming the largely-underpaid, mostly-volunteer maintainers of open source projects. Dozens of the most popular open source projects have either greatly limited, or even entirely closed their projects to community-based submissions from new contributors as a result. In addition to slowing down and disrupting the open source ecosystem's collaboration model, there's also collateral damage with the destruction of one of the best paths for new coders to establish their credentials, build relationships, and learn to be part of the coding community.
• The most vital open content platforms, like Wikipedia, are under direct attack from bad-faith campaigns. Elon Musk has created Grokipedia to directly undermine Wikipedia with extremist hate content and conspiracist nonsense, by siphoning off traffic, revenues, and contributors from the site. All of this happens while launching spurious attacks on the credibility of the content on Wikipedia, which have led to such radical rhetoric around the site that gatherings of Wikipedia editors now face interruptions from armed attackers. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's human traffic has dropped significantly as AI platforms trained on its content answer users' questions without ever sending them to the site — a pattern that threatens the volunteer contributions and donations that keep it alive.
• The open standards and specifications that underpin the Internet as we know it have always succeeded solely on the basis of there being a shared set of norms and values that make them work. In this way, they're like laws — only as strong as the society that agrees they ought to be enforced. A simple text file called robots.txt functioned for decades to describe the way that tools like search engines ought to behave when accessing content on websites, but now it is effectively dead as Big AI companies unilaterally decided to ignore more than a generation of precedent, and do whatever they want with the entirety of the web, completely without consent. Similarly, long-running efforts like Creative Commons and other community-driven attempts at creating shared declarations or definitions for content use are increasingly just ignored.
• Open source software licenses, which used to be a bedrock of the software community because they provide a consistent way of encoding a set of principles in the form of a legal contract, are now treated as a minor obstacle which can be trivially overcome using LLMs. This means that it's possible to clone code and turn community-driven projects into commercial products without even having to credit the people who invented the original work, let alone compensating them or asking for consent. Many of these efforts are especially egregious because the reason the tools are able to perform this task is because they were trained on this open source code in the first place.