Let’s take artificial intelligence’s structural hostility to journalism. A recent study by Aengus Bridgman and Taylor Owen of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in Canada showed that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok had been scraping Canadian news outlets (including paywalled stories — plunder!!), because the contents of those outlets’ work would appear in the AI bots’ responses. This news content was appearing unattributed. However, the bots would usually list attribution after being prompted — meaning that the data was in the AI model, it just wasn’t offering it up without extra user exertion. And users usually don’t like extra exertion. This is bad design that only harms news providers and consumers, especially given AI’s well known weakness of providing inaccurate, made-up outputs in addition to just ripping off news outlets and undermining their revenue models, which are based in some form or another on aggregating audience attention. The rapacious and uncompensated AI scraping of the open web is having the perverse effect of incentivizing more high-quality journalism to get gated behind paywalls where bots can get more easily blocked, ultimately driving up the costs of quality journalism to everyone on a social level.