AI Companies Are Parasites
This opinion piece characterizes AI companies as parasitic entities that exploit human-generated data and infrastructure without providing fair compensation. The author argues that AI development harms communities, strains resources, and threatens the sustainability of the open internet.
Why it matters
It reflects growing grassroots and creator-class resentment toward the rapid, often uncompensated, ingestion of intellectual property by AI firms.
AI companies are parasites • Cory Dransfeldt
An organism living in, on, or with another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host. That's it, right? The whole thing, their entire business model. Scrape the whole of the internet, destroy books, siphon everything they can from whoever they can without compensation, and call it fair use. Train models on said stolen data. Sell metered access to the models. Repeat until you've killed the host. Hope you can head off the effects of AI inbreeding. The old bargain of traffic for indexing is gone. Scrapers overload infrastructure. Clickthroughs collapse. Communities collapse. 1
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in