The Hidden Cost of ChatGPT is the Erosion of the Digital Commons

Is AI destroying the internet? Are we running out of good data? Will AI increasingly eat its own excrement? All these questions are being asked right now and the answer to all of them feels like "yes." But how do we know and what evidence do we have? Perhaps the real question is this: what is happening to the digital commons that underpins so much of the modern web?

At the heart of the issue is the very nature of how ChatGPT and other AI models are trained. These systems consume troves of publicly available data, from Wikipedia articles and Reddit posts to open-source code repositories like GitHub. They then use this data to build their knowledge base and generate outputs in response to user queries. They stand on the shoulders of the digital giants—the countless contributors who have voluntarily shared their knowledge and creativity online for the benefit of all.

A new study suggests that the rise of ChatGPT may be eroding these foundations. Focusing on the popular programming Q&A platform Stack Overflow, the researchers found a significant drop in user activity following the release of ChatGPT. Using sophisticated statistical models, they estimate a 16% decrease in weekly posts, with the effect growing to 25% within six months. Importantly, this decline was not limited to low-quality or duplicate content, which means we should worry because even valuable and novel contributions were being displaced.