--- title: AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons | daily.dev description: The scientific literature functions as an information commons, a resource no one owns and everyone shares. This article argues AI provides the tools to enable... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-enclosure-of-the-scientific-commons-7aeuiymdr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons | daily.dev og:description: The scientific literature functions as an information commons, a resource no one owns and everyone shares. This article argues AI provides the tools to enable... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-enclosure-of-the-scientific-commons-7aeuiymdr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/7AEuiymDr.png og:image:alt: AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The scientific literature functions as an information commons, a resource no one owns and everyone shares. This article argues AI provides the tools to enable a previously infeasible enclosure of that commons, drawing a parallel to England's agricultural enclosure movement of roughly 1600 to 1800. That historical enclosure turned shared land into private property and is widely judged theft at a societal scale. AI-enabled enclosure works differently but shares the same features: turning commons into private wealth and undermining supporting social systems through 'slop spam'. The piece frames this as potentially an attack on a whole way of life, not just a smash-and-grab. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the enclosure movement and how does it relate to AI and scientific information? The enclosure movement (roughly 1600 to 1800) was the historical transformation of shared English agricultural common lands into private property, often judged as theft at a societal scale. This article argues AI provides the tools to enable a similar, previously infeasible enclosure of the scientific information commons, turning shared knowledge into private wealth while undermining the social systems that support it through 'slop spam'. _Developers tracking AI's effect on open knowledge and publishing can follow debates like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 66 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-23). **TL;DR:** The discussion is split: some argue AI could democratize scientific research by lowering barriers to entry, while many counter that compute and resource concentration in a handful of companies, plus a flood of low-quality AI-generated papers, will entrench a few powerful players and overwhelm peer review. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 45% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue AI gives anyone with a laptop and modest resources the ability to automate research tasks and iterate across methods, not just elite labs. - One person reports reading far more papers across varied subjects in the past year because AI makes literature more accessible and digestible. - Others note open preprint servers and public-entity-run journals (e.g., in astrophysics) already provide free access, undercutting the commons-enclosure framing. **The pushback** - Many worry only a handful of companies/labs control the compute needed for serious AI-driven research, recreating the oligopoly problem. - Commenters describe a coming flood of AI-generated 'slop' papers that could overwhelm journals and peer reviewers, effectively a denial-of-service on academic publishing. - Several note existing academic publishing is already controlled by a few for-profit corporations (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc.), questioning whether the 'commons' was ever truly unowned. - Some tie current science funding cuts to a political push to redirect money away from human researchers toward AI-driven programs, raising concerns about politicization rather than pure technological inevitability. - One commenter criticizes the piece's treatment of open source as shallow, noting most open source is permissively licensed and funded by for-profit companies, undermining the article's framing. **By community** - hackernews (heated): Strong disagreement over whether AI democratizes science or concentrates power further, with side debates on publishing oligopolies, funding cuts, and open source licensing. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI will democratize scientific contribution to a wider range of participants or further concentrate research power in a few resource-rich companies. **Open questions** - How will peer review and reputation-building work if AI-generated submissions overwhelm journals? - Will compute and hardware costs actually fall enough to meaningfully democratize access, or will the same economies of scale keep favoring large companies? - Should scientific papers be protected from being used to train closed/proprietary AI models, and how would that be enforced? **Highlights** > Most published research is controlled by 5 for-profit corporations. Academic publishing is predominantly controlled by a small oligopoly of five for-profit corporations that collectively publish roughly 50% of all scientific articles: Elsevier (owned by RELX Group), Springer Nature, Wiley (John Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa PLC), and SAGE Publications. It only feels "unowned" to academics because their institutions pay for access, which they can use. The general public mostly cannot. Going forward, colleges can pay for ChatGPT and things like it, and presumably will. The AI companies will be happy to sell to them. There's really no problems here except for self-created ones (for example, if some researchers don't want to use AI). Of course, they're free to do that, just like they're free to not use computers. But then don't complain that doing stuff takes too long. > — [jujube3 on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201197) > Those 5 corporations have an achilles heel: reviewers. If the AI-driven science future has its way, the reviewers at all the major journals will collapse under the weight of submissions. The effect will be a denial-of-service, not unlike the one experienced by open source projects in the era of AI-driven pull requests. > — [tarsierscripter on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201412) > I have read more paper in the last year than the last ten years. Across a wide variety of subjects. While the AIs still need open access to science in order to function, they have make that open access something I can actually use like no other technology before it. Nothing has opened the scientific commons to me like AI. There may be a concern going forward with locking things down. One can lament that AIs need to be prompted to "hit the literature" directly or they don't really think about it, prefering random web pages most of the time. But at least at the moment science is more open and accessible than ever before. > — [jerf on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202308) > It's not terrifying because it's unknown. It's terrifying because a tiny number of obscenely rich psychopaths are trying to take sole control of it so they can enshrine themselves as living gods and make 99% of humans so obsolete that they die sick and cold in the streets. That's their overt goal, and almost all evidence we have from history and current politics suggests that they will be wildly successful at this. None of this is for you, it's all for them. All of it. That's why it's terrifying. > — [feoren on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203146) > The discussion of open source was pretty anemic. The author seems to think open source is only GPL copyleft. In reality the vast majority of open source is permissively licensed, and the development was funded by for-profit companies. That seems like a crucial thing to consider when discussing how our information commons has come to be. Near the end they include a paragraph claiming we should interpret this piece as being about more than self-interest and resistance to change, but it doesn't really feel like the piece offered a taste of what that "more" is. The most thought-provoking part for me was considering that AI companies have used pretty much all available data for training while "they spend more and more money to create proprietary training data". That seems to break a sort of intuitive social contract - like, well you all used everyone's knowledge. Send yours back out too. Grant from 3brown1blue released a video exploring the economics and mechanics that enable careers in math, in light of the AI company releases over the last couple weeks. Overall it felt a lot more hopeful, and it didn't need to strain really hard to apply a historical framework like enclosure. Worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc > — [stellar678 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201859) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187248) · 6 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50199230) · 106 points · 66 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Schneier on Security](https://daily.dev/posts/schneier-on-security-dpcmbdroy) · Schneier on Security · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Commodified Intelligence](https://daily.dev/posts/commodified-intelligence-1cia8jess) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons](https://daily.dev/posts/the-tragedy-of-the-cognitive-commons-yv9osjmb5) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Import AI 475: Swarm scaling; Google DeepMind watermarks biology; and the AI science economy](https://daily.dev/posts/import-ai-475-swarm-scaling-google-deepmind-watermarks-biology-and-the-ai-science-economy-1ee7eusv5) · Import AI · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-professors-are-negotiating-the-new-realities-of-academic-research-pszisl5xf) · MIT Technology Review · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#ethical-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ethical-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-enclosure-of-the-scientific-commons-7aeuiymdr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-enclosure-of-the-scientific-commons-7aeuiymdr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-enclosure-of-the-scientific-commons-7aeuiymdr"},"datePublished":"2026-10-22T22:22:53.666Z","dateModified":"2026-10-23T01:20:35.725Z","description":"The scientific literature functions as an information commons, a resource no one owns and everyone shares. 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