OpenAI’s Jason Kwon Does Not Understand the Web
“We are a player in an ecosystem,” he says. “If you want to participate in this ecosystem in a way that is open, then this is the reciprocal trade that everybody’s interested in.” Without this trade, he says, the web begins to retract, to close — and that’s bad for OpenAI and everyone. “We do all this so the web can stay open.”
He alludes to the reciprocal social contract that has allowed us to find content for 30 years: I run a website on which I publish content. I allow search engines to crawl my site and to download and index the content I created. In return, I get traffic. For certain key words, the search engine will show a link, which people use to visit my site and enjoy its content. I can monetise those visits by placing advertisements on my site or selling other merchandise like T-shirts, or books, or mouse pads with my face on it.
But OpenAI’s participation on the Web isn’t reciprocal. OpenAI crawls my site and downloads and trains it’s models on the content I created. These models power their products. OpenAI sells access to their models via their API or advanced features on their chatbot. They use my content to make money. The difference to Google is that they don’t give me anything in return. They don’t link to my site. Nor do they pay to access the content I created.
Without the content OpensAI downloaded from the Web, most of it for free, their models would be useless, they wouldn’t have a product. OpenAI is leeching of people’s work and creativity. They are breaching the social contract of this open ecosystem.
As a result the Web might indeed retract. Not because us content publishers find ways to prevent OpenAI’s bots from accessing our websites. But because products like OpenAI’s flood the Web with machine-generated garbage drowning out human-made content. The Web will retract because of companies like OpenAI, not despite them.