Harvard paper frames AI as enclosure of scientific commons

A 14-page essay posted to arXiv on October 19 casts the scientific literature as an 'information commons': 'an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone."' The author, P. K. G. Williams of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, argues that AI is the tool that finally makes privatising it feasible.

Williams reaches back to the English enclosure movement of roughly 1600 to 1800, when common agricultural land was converted into private property. 'Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale,' the paper says. The claim is that artificial intelligence 'provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons.'

The mechanism he names is 'slop spam', which he says undermines the social systems that sustain a commons. The result, in his framing, 'shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth.'

The paper runs 14 pages with 32 references and is a conceptual essay rather than an empirical study: it offers no measurement of the effect, only a scholarly frame for what Williams calls 'the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.'