Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
Much of the talk about generative artificial intelligence (AI), the large language models that power systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, has centered around the way these companies gain the staggering amount of data needed to train models through the scraping of data.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia and its myriad of related projects, said in a 2025 report that nearly 65% of its most resource-taxing traffic comes from bots scraping Wikipedia. This number has only been increasing, forcing the nonprofit to dedicate more of its resources toward upkeep and maintenance to support the pace.
At the same time, with the data being fed into AI models, the site is seeing less and less human traffic and community interaction. While Wikimedia is famously dedicated to the free and open sharing of information, usually through open-source and nonprofit projects, it’s pretty clear this is not what its founders intended.
In American copyright law, there’s a concept called fair use. It’s a messy and deeply contentious topic, but as defined by the U.S. Copyright Office, it’s a legal doctrine that defines what people can do with copyrighted content that does not belong to them. Typically, it covers nonprofit, educational and “transformative” uses. Exactly what falls under fair use varies wildly, with some companies being far more aggressive about their intellectual property than others.
Fair use is central to the AI debate. The typical argument of the people running data scrapers is that they are just doing what human readers are doing, consuming content and learning from it, and that there is no real difference between a bot and a human in this context.
On the surface, this idea isn’t overly controversial. You could argue the statistical models that power modern AI systems are at least partly transformative. But any legitimacy to this argument quickly falls apart. They wish to take all the content from the web, billions of hours of work on just as many disparate sites and projects, and sell it back.
The news site Ars Technica reported on unsealed court documents that contained internal messages where executives from companies like OpenAI and Microsoft discussed fair use. Their comments are damning. Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht said data scrapers made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use,’” and it was the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
This is really the core of the issue.
AI has been catastrophic to the environment, with Google recently coming under fire for illegally clearing some 250,000 trees in northern Finland, as reported by the Guardian. It has led to endless scams, with nearly nine in 10 Americans reporting they have encountered digital scams, as CBS News found, and even more rampant misinformation.
But the real issue and danger of AI is the devaluation of skills, creativity, the humanities and labor itself. That is the primary use of these systems and their main goal.
It is not a democratization of skills, because a person using a chatbot or image generator is neither a writer nor an artist. Art is far more than the result; it’s about the process and the experience that creating something yourself does for you. Using a bot to do it misses the point of art itself.
It’s a fundamentally human experience, and no amount of advertising or forced integration will ever change that.
Beyond fundamentally misunderstanding what art is and why it is so fundamentally important to the human experience, the other goal of these systems is to strip away the need for skilled creators. A machine will never understand the power of creating, the satisfaction of writing a novel idea that you’ve not stopped thinking about since you were 13 or the catharsis of getting a brushstroke just right.
But that’s not the point.
In this day and age, where profit and shareholder value are placed above everything else, that doesn’t matter. The companies pushing these systems, and the companies mandating their adoption, don’t want to pay for actual human creation. It’s not as profitable.
AI is a labor issue above all else. It’s a representation of the continual devaluation of anything that doesn’t make numbers on a balance sheet go up. It’s used to replace a person who cares and feels and creates, with a machine that does none of those things. It’s used to cut costs and streamline out messy human feelings that get in the way of money.
AI has always been theft and has always been about labor. It’s just a surprise it took this long for them to admit it.
babbce@miamioh.edu
Charley Babb is a junior majoring in professional writing. He is an Opinion writer for The Miami Student and a fencer in the Miami Medieval Club. He likes reading and creative writing in his free time.
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