用 AI 翻了一篇英文版，有錯不是我的錯喔。
When AI Walls Sever the Web’s Connective Tissue: Reflections on Creation, Knowledge, and a Fair Ecosystem
【Collective Advocacy: Speaking Out Together】
Plundering Creativity in the Name of AI? Refusing to Let AI Turn the Internet into a Lifeless Wasteland
Hey Google Gemini! Help me write an open letter protesting your suspected plagiarism of creative works | Jorsindo Motor Club
Many fear that AI will eventually destroy humanity by stealing our jobs or taking over the world. However, the most immediate and critical crisis is unfolding in a far quieter, yet much more lethal manner: AI is bringing human intellectual vitality to a standstill.
When our creation and sharing are denied basic respect, we choose to remain silent. When we stop sharing, exploring, and supporting one another's work, the open internet loses its pulse, ultimately freezing into a stagnant, lifeless wasteland.
This is not merely a livelihood crisis for content creators; it is a cultural catastrophe that threatens everyone’s freedom to seek knowledge. If you search for information or send messages online today, you cannot afford to stand by as an idle spectator.
This is an open letter to everyone in the digital age who searches, communicates, and relies on collective human intelligence to survive. We often assume we are just onlookers watching creators struggle from the shore. In reality, as long as we use the internet, we share the same water source. When the source is drained by relentless extraction, we will all eventually have nothing left to drink.
Following recent technological milestones, we are witnessing Google accelerate its efforts to lock open-web information inside closed walls using AI Agents and Gemini. This issue goes far beyond whether creators can make a living. It directly concerns whether our right to seek knowledge will be monopolized, and whether diverse human perspectives will be entirely replaced by a single tech conglomerate.
To ensure the sustainability of this ecosystem, we need to establish fair rules. Regulatory bodies must step in to prevent tech platforms from cutting off traffic under the guise of technological evolution—a practice aimed at slashing their own copyright and acquisition costs at the expense of others. We must make the rule of "fair compensation for utilization" a standard, restoring a healthy, positive cycle for digital information.
1. An Absurd Discovery: AI Extracts Your Data but Hides the Source
The screenshot above was recorded during routine, daily interactions with Gemini, serving as the spark for this collective advocacy.
When asked about recent privacy controversies surrounding Meta's smart glasses, Gemini provided a detailed summary clearly referencing specific media reports. However, it did not provide a single clickable hyperlink to the original articles.
More absurdly, when directly questioned, "Why didn't you provide the source links?" Gemini offered a polite, automated apology and claimed to "update the key sources." Yet, the result was merely spelling out the names of the media outlets in plain text—still refusing to provide clickable hyperlinks.
This is not a technical glitch; it is a dangerous paradigm shift. When AI platforms utilize human effort to build their own credibility but strip away the audience's path to click, verify, and read the original work, they sever the connection between readers and creators. The open web is being quietly converted into a private toll booth for tech giants.
2. Not Just Traditional Media: Who is Facing the Brunt of the Livelihood Impact?
In this technological transition, any public content on the internet faces uneven and unfair competition. The very creators who sustain the diversity of our digital ecosystem are bearing the brunt:
- Writers and Knowledge Producers (Bloggers, Independent Media, Journalists, Academics):In-depth interviews, investigative reports, and research that took weeks or months to produce are instantly digested and summarized by AI, turning into instant answers on search pages. The original websites receive zero traffic.
- Video and Audio Creators (YouTubers, Podcasters, Online Educators):Modern AI possesses powerful multimodal capabilities that no longer rely on manual subtitles. AI can actively "listen" to audio and "watch" video frames, automatically transcribing and analyzing the semantic core. When AI extracts the exact solution or highlight directly onto the search interface, users have no reason to click and watch the video. Consequently, video plays, ad revenues, and sponsorships vanish.
- Lifestyle and Fashion Creators (Influencers, Stylists, Designers):Their hard-earned outfit reviews and fit-testing experiences could soon be quietly ingested as the underlying data for "AI Virtual Try-On" features. Due to the "black box" nature of large models, creators face a helpless dilemma—they may suspect their work has been absorbed, but they lack any viable evidence to prove the plagiarism. Consumers get their virtual try-ons and summaries on the search page, completely bypassing the creators' profiles and websites.
- Developers and Open-Source Contributors (Programmers, Maintainers):Solutions and code snippets shared selflessly in developer communities are ingested into commercial code generation tools, repackaged, and sold back to developers, leaving the original contributors with no credit and no compensation.
3. What Happens When We Stop Sharing?
When the sources of open-web information are depleted, even everyday internet users will quickly face catastrophic consequences:
1. A Lack of Basic Respect: Big Tech is Quietly Snuffing Out the Will to Share
Human beings initially share knowledge, tutorials, or solutions online out of simple, altruistic goodwill. Most of the time, we do it to help a stranger solve a frustrating bug, avoid a bad purchase, or simply to find a sense of connection and a small "thank you" in the vast digital space.
But tech giants treat this spontaneous goodwill as free, infinite fuel. AI absorbs your words and experiences, wraps them in its own interface, and refuses to offer even a basic clickable link in return.
When sharing is reduced to uncompensated, one-way labor for a digital black box, the motivation to contribute naturally evaporates. This dynamic initiates a silent strike, stalling the collective output of human creativity and leaving the digital space entirely stagnant.
Most ironically, Google itself rose to prominence by riding on the coattails of internet users' selfless sharing and mutual web linking. Today, the greatest beneficiary of the open web is using AI walls and one-way extraction to extinguish the very passion that nurtured its growth.
2. Selfless Sharing vs. Selfish Extraction: The Stark Irony of Wikipedia vs. Google
The history of the internet gave us Wikipedia—a monument to human collaboration. It is a brilliant example of humanity "actively and selflessly contributing" knowledge based on mutual trust and respect. Wikipedia succeeded because every claim is clearly and transparently cited, allowing readers to trace information back to its roots. It is a healthy, mutually reinforcing loop of knowledge.
In stark contrast, Google, which famously adopted "Don't be evil" as its founding motto, has drifted in the opposite direction. It uses AI to conduct a one-way extraction of value without giving back, transforming a collective human legacy into a proprietary, closed database.
This shift reveals a painful truth: when a tech giant controlling the gateway to global information abandons its original values to maximize its own profit, it abdicates its responsibility toward human civilization and the open web, using technological barriers to choke the very foundation of shared progress.
3. Why Block Clicks? The Business Calculation Behind the Wall
In the classic open web, whether through clicking links to visit original sites or reciprocal traffic distribution, creators and publishers could at least earn ad revenue, subscriptions, or platform dividends. This "click-to-reward" consensus is the economic lifeblood of the web.
By keeping users locked inside its AI interface, the platform restricts the free flow of traffic. This artificial barrier blocks creators from gaining external dot-clicks and support, allowing the platform to monopolize ad revenue and data value at practically zero acquisition cost.
4. Local Shops and Independent Brands Will Vanish Too — Can AI Really Understand Your Simple Pleasures?
Independent creators and niche influencers are the vital bridge between local, independent designers and the public. When AI intercepts all search traffic and promotes only corporate conglomerates that pay premium ad fees within its own interface, small businesses face systemic marginalization. Our lifestyle choices will be homogenized into a handful of massive chain stores, with AI filtering everything we see, stripping our digital experiences of any unique variety.
5. Negative Loop: Without Fresh Human Ideas, AI Declines and Degrades
In computer science, this is known as "Model Collapse." When AI models are trained predominantly on AI-generated content rather than fresh human inputs, their logic, intelligence, and accuracy degrade exponentially. By consuming human creativity as a disposable, finite fuel for short-term gain, tech giants are setting AI up to choke on its own recycled outputs.
6. Charging Users for Compute, Expecting Creators to Work for Free
When we want to use premium AI features, tech companies charge us subscription fees, citing expensive compute and electricity costs. Yet, when they scrape humanity's collective work to train these models, they treat it as free raw material. Why is Big Tech's electricity expensive, while the human life spent creating the content is valued at zero?
4. Engaging with Gemini: Countering AI's Alleged Plagiarism Through "Sharing"
Start with a simple prompt: "Help me write an open letter protesting Google's suspected attempt to plagiarize the work of global creators through AI and SEO crawlers." From your own perspective, try having an honest dialogue with Google about your viewpoints, worries, and concerns regarding AI's extraction of human effort.
Without spending much time, and without needing complex or paid generative language models, you can easily co-author a protest letter with the AI itself—a concept that is highly ironic yet effortless.
We encourage everyone to share these results. Our hope is to make AI companies like Google realize that AI should never be used as a universal shield to justify the uncompensated exploitation of human labor.
5. Our Three Demands: Establish Fair Rules to Keep the Web Alive
We seek to turn these dialogues into a real force for regulatory change, presenting three clear demands to technology companies and government bodies:
- Establish a Fair "Attribution and Compensation" System:Regulators must intervene to ensure tech giants cannot use technological walls to cut off creators' livelihoods. AI attribution metrics must be fully transparent, operating like an academic Citation Index. Whenever AI references, synthesizes, or utilizes a creator's work, the platform must pay a corresponding licensing or referral fee based on citation metrics, fostering a sustainable "utilization for compensation" cycle.
- Safeguard Creator Autonomy and Opt-Out Rights:Creators and platforms must have the legal right to opt-out of AI training data without having their traditional search rankings penalized by search engines.
- Restore Basic Citation Standards:All AI-generated answers must prominently feature clickable, direct hyperlinks to the original sources in their initial output, rejecting any attempts to hide traffic behind plain-text attribution.
We refuse to let humanity's shared intellectual treasury be quietly enclosed and privatized by a handful of tech conglomerates. Tech giants must be regulated, governments must take action, and we can no longer remain silent.
Copy the prompt, talk to Gemini, and let us use the power of rational discourse to protect human creativity and our collective right to search freely.
#WriteProtestWithGemini #HoldBigTechAccountable #FairCompensationForCreators #ProtectTheOpenWeb
|
1
1484
