It’s society’s problem, enabled by changes in technology around AI and LLMs. We have the potential to build the world’s greatest repository of knowledge and what little progress we had made has been eroded in recent years by Ai technologies. It seems reasonable that chatbot style LLMs can help, but they currently do this by replacing a sea of web pages with a single corporate interface.

I think it’s worth asking questions about how our data is being used to fuel corporate interfaces to that data, who owns the rights to that data and those systems, and consider how we might maintain independent creators on such a system. Will iFixit still have the resources and means to take high quality documentary photos and write ups for new devices if everyone consumes that information via an Apple, Google, or OpenAI interface? How will you post a structured, expandable, localizable repository of your own data to share, aka how will you publish web pages and how will people find them?

I believe society will solve these problems via the actions of many individuals and organizations, but with certain organizations holding so much power it’s important to consider and inquire on how that power is being used.