AI will probably force you to gate your content

"This fall, I noticed that Elon Musk's Grok had taken the archives of my newsletter Tedium - for better or worse, my life's work - and converted it into hundreds of AI-generated entries on Grokipedia. Many of these entries didn't cite Tedium posts once, but rather, upwards of 40 times, rephrasing concepts seemingly line by line. (Even worse, the site is set up in a way that essentially hides referrers in site analytics, but shows up in search results.)"

"Much of the attention around Grokipedia has focused on its heavy reuse of Wikipedia or its political bias, not its aggressive reuse of content by publishers large and small. It's one thing for OpenAI and Claude to build something transformative but controversial from existing digital content (and, fittingly, face class-action lawsuits from authors). But Grokipedia seems to be working at a level beyond even aggregation - and, most daunting of all, it's run by the world's richest man."

"On the scale of fan to skeptic to hater, when it comes to emerging AI tech like large language models and agentic coding, I've traditionally been very much in the middle - fascinated by the potential technical benefits, but often feeling it's bubbly and over-emphasized. (The metaphor I lean on should sound familiar to any vintage newspaper designer: Like Photoshop, it's a useful tool that's all too easy to abuse. Avoid the default filters.) My optimism was cautious at best."

Elon Musk's Grok converted the Tedium newsletter archives into hundreds of AI-generated Grokipedia entries, frequently rephrasing material line-by-line and often omitting or minimizing citations. Many Grokipedia pages drew heavily from Tedium content without clear attribution, and the site is structured to hide referrer information while appearing in search results, potentially competing for keywords and traffic. Attention around Grokipedia has focused on Wikipedia reuse and political bias, but aggressive repurposing of publisher content creates new challenges for small and niche publishers. The practice raises concerns about aggregation beyond existing models and concentration of power behind a wealthy operator.

Read at Nieman Lab