Colour me cynical mauve, but you would have to pry the current business model out of advertisers' cold dead hands.

What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in human knowledge". We all know that is not what sells, and that the opposite of this will continue to inundate the infosphere.

> What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

This is the part of the new AI paradigm that concerns me the most, and I think you are correct.

If "pay for placement" (or worse "legislate for placement") in LLM training becomes a thing, then we lose all transparency as these biases get baked into the knowledge set, and users have no way of knowing where and when they get applied.

If AI companies continue to grow and be successful, and if they continue to depend on scraping human-written content to train their models, and if any tech can gain enough adoption to prevent AI from doing so without paying (and without hurting non-scraper readers), then creators will get paid. That is what the claim seems to be here. You can say it's a long shot, but it's not fundamentally at odds with the existing legible incentives.

People like the current model too, because you can access most(ish) content without ads or subscription if you ad-block.

This discussion is going to be rife with the pot calling the kettle black as people who have blocked every ad for the last 15 years call out AI for not compensating creators...