Wikipedia: Wikipedia, one of the most trusted and popular websites on the Internet, has now taken a big step towards earning money from its content. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia has announced new business agreements with many artificial intelligence companies. Through these deals, AI companies will now use Wikipedia’s content with fixed terms and payment.
From Amazon to Microsoft, many giants involved
Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, said that it has signed agreements with companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity and France’s Mistral AI. The purpose of these agreements is to give AI companies fast and large-scale access to Wikipedia’s vast knowledge base. However, no official information has been shared regarding the amount of these deals.
The dream of free internet and the increasing pressure of AI
Wikipedia has long been considered a symbol of the open and free Internet. But now the situation is changing. The dominance of big tech platforms and the rapidly increasing use of generative AI chatbots have created new challenges for platforms like Wikipedia. Many AI models are being trained by scraping data from the web without any payment, in which Wikipedia content is used in large quantities.
Who should pay for AI training?
With AI companies mining data on a large scale, the question has arisen as to who will bear the cost of this AI revolution. Wikimedia Foundation says that due to AI companies, there is huge pressure on the servers, the price of which the organization has to pay. Keeping this in view, Wikipedia now wants to earn revenue from commercial use of its content.
Such deals have happened before too
This is not the first time that Wikipedia has entered into such an agreement with AI or tech companies. In the year 2022, Google was made its first enterprise customer. After this, last year a similar partnership was also made with small search engines like Ecosia.
Clear message from Jimmy Wales
According to media reports, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has supported the use of Wikipedia data by AI. He says that Wikipedia’s content is curated by humans, so it is more reliable for AI models. However, he also made it clear that AI companies should not get everything for free and they will have to pay a fair price for their use.
Human visits decreased, number of bots increased
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, there has been a decline of about 8 percent in human traffic on Wikipedia last year. On the other hand, the activity of AI bots has increased rapidly. Many bots scrape content secretly to avoid detection, which puts additional pressure on the server.
Changing Internet and Wikipedia’s new strategy
AI search and chatbots have now started giving direct answers to users, due to which people are reducing the clicks on websites. Amidst this changing digital trend, Wikipedia has made it clear that instead of clashing with AI companies, it wants to work with them, but on its own terms.
Overall, this step of Wikipedia is being considered as a new attempt to create a balance between free internet and earning which can decide the direction of online knowledge platforms in the future.
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