When AI resells your ideas for free, the rational move is to paywall them. The open web empties of experts, fills with scammers, and most of us read the scraps.

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For thirty years the open web ran on a bargain: publish freely, and attention flows back to you. AI search breaks that bargain, it answers with your work and the reader never reaches you. So creators start pricing their knowledge instead of giving it away, and the academic publishers are already doing it ($75M for Taylor & Francis, $44M for Wiley). That splits the internet in two: expensive models stay sharp on licensed knowledge, while the free tools most people use fall behind on an aging, scammer-filled public web. AI is backward-looking; creativity is forward-looking. Optimizing a population toward the first cuts it off from the second.