Wikipedia is just… facts. The Wikimedia Foundation collected and collated those facts using unpaid community members funded in large part by charitable donations over the course of decades. Arguably they have even less right to withhold access to the data they’ve been entrusted with than anyone else in this situation considering the other parties are private entities.

I understand the desire to label anyone supporting the beast that is these AI companies as complicit… but let’s try not to cut off our noses to spite our collective face. It’s not the librarian’s job to make morality decisions about who’s checking out the books, it’s their job to distribute the knowledge and keep the library open.

Realistically how were they going to stop them? I mean, practically speaking.

They offer the entire thing free to download and no slop company has ever hesitated to steal literary work from actual publishing companies and authors that are currently suing them.

Seems to me like their options were get paid or not get paid.

We are a species that seeks unexploited niches for resource optimization. In the past those resources were things that made us directly happy like food and shelter but now we’ve moved on to more abstract concepts like “wealth”. That drive and ability to abstract and outthink our competitors is how we got to the top of the food chain on this planet.

There is no off switch.