Exploratory Online Workshop on Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons.
Organized by the Joint Research Center of the European Union.
28.03.2025
Background:
A part of a broader effort to understand and address the societal effects and systemic risks of artificial intelligence, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is hosting a one-day exploratory online workshop with a group of selected experts to discuss how generative AI is affecting the production, distribution, and use of free and open resources online. As the first General-Purpose AI code of practice for the EU AI Act is currently being drawn up, a key goal of the workshop is to identify scientific and policy-oriented knowledge gaps concerning generative AI and the digital commons.
I was asked to prepare the 10-minute input statement.
Title: It's commoning, not commons!
Abstract: The free software movement has always maintained that there is a difference between free as in free speech, and free as in free beer. Generative AI, or the companies developing the models, however, treat the commons simply as yet another free resource. Free beer. That is the only aspect they are interested in. However, there can be no commons without commoners (people in engaged with one another through the commons) and without commoning (rule-based, self-organized processes of working together).
Seen from the perspective of commoners and commoning, Generative AI is the opposite of the commons. Rather than bringing people into a collaborative relationship, it isolates them from one another. Rather than allowing for self-organized rule-making, it offers service based on opaque, unaccountable and centrally set rules.
While I can imagine many ways in which analytical AI can be used in the service of the commons, with GenAI, I don't see this beyond narrow technical fields.
Thus, the question we should ask is: how can we fork, in the sense of making incompatible, the model of the digital commons from the model of GenAI? I think this requires legal, technical and organizational/social innovation.
