Article by Samuel Greengard: “The generosity of strangers has long powered online communities. Spaces like Stack Overflow, GitHub, curl, OpenSSL, Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap have a rich history of volunteers sharing knowledge and maintaining code, encyclopedias, and maps.
Now, AI is having a say. Trained on content from these sites, it is changing how volunteers contribute and how users consume content. Stack Overflow, for example, has seen monthly questions fall from a peak of roughly 200,000 in 2014 to about 1,400 in July 2026. Meanwhile, a deluge of contributions—often fake and misleading—has overrun these projects.
This has created unease about the future of online knowledge sharing. “We are starting to replace social communities and their underlying processes with a piece of software,” said Gordon Burtch, Allen and Kelli Questrom Professor in Information Systems at Boston University. “As fewer people go to the community with questions, the incentive for experts to be there falls in turn.”
He isn’t the only one sounding alarms. “There is a huge fear, with growing evidence, that AI companies are kicking the legs out from underneath the table they are eating at,” said Benjamin Mako Hill, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington and a longtime contributor to peer-production projects.
The stakes extend beyond site traffic and human connections. Fundamental questions arise about the quality of AI-provided information, who owns and profits from it, and what role humans play in vetting it. The cycle can also be recursive: models trained on public knowledge inhibit the production of new content. The question now is: will these communities evolve or disappear?..(More)”.
