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But the trouble with trying to continually narrow the definitions of “free” is that it is impossible to write a license that will perfectly prohibit each possibility that makes a person go “wait, no, not like that” while retaining the benefits of free and open access.

Often by trying to wall off those considered to be bad actors, people wall off the very people they intended to give access to.

The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.

This isn’t just about strain on one individual project, it’s about the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that makes open knowledge possible.

Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators' terms.