The Internet has long existed in a state of tension over where value gets created, how it is consumed, and who pays for it. This had evolved into an uneasy truce of ad-supported big sites, making the web almost (but not quite) unusable for most people except a few adblocking freeloaders who get the good experience.

AI just blows all that up by providing a general-purpose plagiarism engine. It offers a substitute for any content, with a similar-looking but inauthentic version. People might accept not paywalling in order to reach human users, but nobody wants to be fodder for the plagiarism bot.

In some ways this is the "Can Googlebot scrape your content and display it on the home page but without generating any ad views for you?" debate we've seen with news publishers before.