AI is Destroying the Foundation of the Open Internet: Creators' Rights Become Negative Assets

Overview

The rapid development of generative AI is reshaping the technological and legal landscape of the internet. While public attention largely focuses on environmental impacts, cybersecurity threats, and the proliferation of disinformation, a deeper crisis is spreading: the foundations of the open internet are being eroded. The delicate balance between software copyright protection and open sharing has long been disrupted, with creators' rights becoming a "negative asset" in the face of algorithmic black boxes.

The Cornerstone of Open Source and Digital Civilization

Looking back over the past four decades, from BASIC programming to the free software movement, the open-source ecosystem has laid the foundation for the modern internet. Licensing agreements such as GPL, MPL, and CC-SA have ensured that knowledge remains open as it flows, through "copyleft" mechanisms. Today's cloud computing, backbone networks, and various digital services are all built upon the shared wisdom of developers across generations. Without this tradition of openness, the internet would likely have devolved into an expensive and oligopolistic closed garden, akin to the early days of AOL or CompuServe. However, as large language models (LLMs) consume web data, the covenant sustaining digital civilization is facing disintegration.

Crisis of Trust and the Creative Dilemma

AI models disregard copyrights and licensing agreements during training, absorbing vast amounts of online content. This results in derivative works being decoupled from their original licenses, and there is currently no effective legal enforcement mechanism. This dynamic directly undermines the social contract between creators and the public, triggering a series of negative consequences:

• Rising privacy and security risks: Creators are forced to distrust shared content online, worrying whether it contains malicious code, poses third-party data leak risks, or constitutes "poisoned" data that infringes on others' intellectual achievements.
• Intellectual property becomes a burden: Publishing code does not necessarily garner recognition; instead, it may expose additional vulnerabilities due to AI-assisted analysis. In contrast, closed code may avoid these risks but contradicts the spirit of open collaboration.
• Surge in maintenance costs: On platforms like GitHub, developers must spend considerable time sifting through invalid pull requests generated by AI, severely disrupting normal development workflows.

Toward a Digital Renaissance

"AI has turned the sharing of knowledge from a gift to the world into a liability for authors."

When open-source licenses fail to constrain algorithms from indiscriminately extracting content, creators face the risk of having both their ethical standards and legal rights erased. The past thirty-five years of open sharing have brought positive, world-empowering changes. If current trends are not curbed, we may step into a Digital Dark Age. Faced with a situation where wealth and power are concentrating in the hands of a few tech giants while labor remains undervalued, technologists, writers, and artists must join hands to drive a new Digital Renaissance, rebuilding a fair, respectful, and sustainable ecosystem for knowledge sharing.