The same could be said for food. And farmers who farm the food. The farmers could say I only want to sell food to people that I know are going to be directly eating it. And not be used in a bunch of other stuff. They might want to talk to the person buying it or the person buying. It might want to talk to the farmer and know how it's grown.

This abstraction has already happened. And many people eat food that is not directly bought from the farmer.

I don't see how this is much different.

The difference is that AI is not people "taking your stuff and building upon it", it's just people taking your stuff in direct competition with you.

To torture your metaphor a little, if information/"question answers" is food, then AI companies are farmers depleting their own soil. They can talk about "more food for everyone" all they want, but it's heading to collapse.

(Consider, especially, that many alternatives to AI were purposefully scuttled. People praise AI search ... primarily by lamenting the current state of Google Search. "Salting their carrot fields to force people to buy their potatos"?)

Setting aside any would-be "AGI" dreams, in the here-and-now AI is incapable of generating new information ex-nihilo. AI recipes need human recipes. If we want to avoid an Information Dust Bowl, we need to act now.

It's funny you seem to think this is a good comeback, but I think it actually proves the author's point. A farmer who cares about their crops probably wouldn't want their crops sold to a megacorp to make into ultra-processed foods, which have been shown time and time again to be bad for people's health.

Sorry, but that is a weird analogy. The farmer still gets money for their food (which is probably the main motivation for them to grow food). Website authors whose writings are ‘remixed’ in an LLM get… nothing.