AI, the new "enclosure" of the scientific commons: an astronomer brings scholarly literature closer to English commons

For Peter K. G. Williams, AI finally provides the tools to privatize shared knowledge, as enclosures did of communal fields between 1600 and 1800.

In a 14-page essay posted on arXiv, astronomer Peter K. G. Williams proposes to look at the scientific literature as an "information commons": a resource that no one owns and that everyone shares. He recalls the economic and political frameworks born from the history of the commons of pre-industrial England, and notes a major difference: the informational commons are flourishing today, while the agricultural commons have disappeared.

According to the author, the latter did not become extinct because of the famous "tragedy of the commons", but because of the enclosure movement which, between about 1600 and 1800, converted them into private property — which many judged, then as now, as a theft on the scale of a society. His thesis: AI offers precisely the means for a previously impossible enclosure of knowledge, by transforming common production into private wealth while undermining the institutions that sustain it, in particular through the influx of low-quality generated content. He sees this as a theoretical basis to explain the widespread feeling that AI threatens not only content, but a whole way of doing science.