How Wikipedia can shape the future of AI – Open Future

the Wikimedia Enterprise initiative, which launched in 2021. It offers paid, enterprise-grade APIs suitable for building commercial solutions on top of Wikipedia content. And Google is one of its first customers (the second is the Internet Archive).

Creative Commons has been exploring how copyright law and tools apply to the generative AI space for many years. Mozilla has recently announced the launch of Mozilla.ai, a new startup tasked with “building a trusted, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem.”

What is at stake is the design of a new content production and distribution ecosystem that will shape the entire digital environment and our societies. As has been the case in the past, a strong actor committed to the values of openness and free knowledge has a chance to tip the balance away from closed ecosystems controlled by commercial monopolis... See more

The challenge for the open movement is already clear: build an alternative to corporate, closed machine learning systems. And to protect the commons from exploitation by these systems.

earch engines have already disintermediated Wikipedia: Google uses Wikipedia content in the information boxes it displays, and as a result, many people need help to click through to Wikipedia itself.

Wikimedia’s contribution to a free and healthy Internet is not limited to its knowledge output — it also counts as a civic, democratic space.

he world needs access to open and democratic AI systems that function as digital public goods.

We could be facing a world in which AI-model interfaces are the new gatekeepers of knowledge, and people are prompting chatbots instead of reading encyclopedias

establishing transparency as a principle that increases the social value of these systems and democratizes these technologies.