Quoting Molly White
![Screenshot of a blog post from the newsletter [citation needed] by Molly White. The article, titled 'Wait, not like that': Free and open access in the age of generative AI, discusses the challenges posed by AI companies using freely available knowledge without contributing back to open projects. The page has a blue header, black text on a white background, and an embedded audio version of the article.](/assets/images/free_and_open_access/Screenshot%202025-03-18%20at%2018-52-04%20%E2%80%9CWait%20not%20like%20that%E2%80%9D%20Free%20and%20open%20access%20in%20the%20age%20of%20generative%20AI.png)
A screenshot of Molly White's article on [citation needed], discussing how AI companies exploit open knowledge without reciprocating, threatening the sustainability of free and open-access projects.
There’s also been an impulse by creators concerned about AI to dramatically limit how people can access their work. Some artists have decided it’s simply not worthwhile to maintain an online gallery of their work when that makes it easily accessible for AI training. Many have implemented restrictive content gates — paywalls, registration-walls, “are you a human”-walls, and similar — to try to fend off scrapers. This too closes off the commons, making it more challenging or expensive for those “every single human beings” described in open access manifestos to access the material that was originally intended to be common goods.
Often by trying to wall off those considered to be bad actors, people wall off the very people they intended to give access to. People who gate their work behind paywalls likely didn’t set out to create works that only the wealthy could access. People who implement registration walls probably didn’t intend for their work to only be available to those willing to put up with the risk of incessant email spam after they relinquish their personal information. People who try to stave off bots with CAPTCHAs asking “are you a human?” probably didn’t mean to limit their material only to abled people7 who are willing to abide ever more protracted and irritating riddles.8 And people using any of these strategies likely didn’t want people to struggle to even find their work in the first place after the paywalls and regwalls and anti-bot mechanisms thwarted search engine indexers or social media previews.
– Molly White, “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI