alt Hacker NewsAll content is going to go behind paywalls.
There is zero incentive or reason for content creators to let AI slurp their content for free and distribute it and get all the money from it.
Everything new will be licensed and if AI companies want access to it, they will need to pay for it, just like we will.
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Of course this neglects why mostly free things that were posted on the internet generally won. Take Microsoft for example. All their money makers are licensed, yet at the same time you can download almost every single one for free and install it.
The people that go behind paywalls don't realize how much they'll have to spend on marketing to catch up to those that are open.
And that's only frames the current state, where models are very expensive to train. Once model training is close to the point where a group of individuals can afford it, it's pretty much game over for our current paradigm. The software police will be running around trying to play whack-a-mole on open weight models with people all over the world.
I don't think this will happen. If most content goes behind a paywall, releasing content for free will again become a valuable source of attention. It used to be so before the web got filled with so much free content that it lost any value.
Will it help? AI authors will just then buy those subscriptions and in the big picture it won't cost that much.