Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have two superpowers. The first superpower is a boon: they can dramatically increase human productivity. I use them on a regular basis to answer questions, learn new skills, write code, create images, and much more, all at a rate of speed and quality that was science fiction just a few years ago. The second superpower is a bane: GenAI is quietly destroying the very ecosystems that made it possible in the first place.
Under the hood, GenAI is built on large language models (LLMs), which are able to extract patterns, structure, and statistical relationships from massive data sets. These data sets consist primarily of content created by human beings: books, blog posts, articles, forum discussions, open source code, art, photography, and so on. LLMs are able to extract value from this content at an unprecedented scale, but all that value is captured by the GenAI company and its users. If you’re a content creator, you get nothing: no attribution, no referral traffic, no revenue share. Not even a thank-you.
This feels unsustainable to me, a bit like a snake eating its own tail. In this blog post, I’ll go through three examples of how GenAI is destroying the very ecosystems it relies on, and then discuss possible solutions that may give everyone (users, GenAI companies, and content creators) more value.
Example #1: online communities
For many years, StackOverflow was the most popular Q&A site for programmers. Any time you hit a weird error while coding, you’d do a search on Google, and more often than not, find a good answer on StackOverflow. But now, in large part due to GenAI, StackOverflow is nearly dead:
Although StackOverflow’s decline started before GenAI went mainstream (ChatGPT was first released in 2022), GenAI accelerated that decline considerably. That’s because nowadays, instead of searching around for an answer on a Q&A site, and working to adapt that answer to your own codebase, you can ask GenAI tools to generate your code, fix any errors you hit, answer any questions you run into, and so on. As a result, you’re considerably more productive.
But it doesn’t seem sustainable. A big part of why GenAI tools can answer programming questions and fix errors in your code is because those tools were trained on StackOverflow data. So you as a programmer and the GenAI tool now get much more value from that data, but StackOverflow gets none. If people stop asking and answering questions, what will GenAI train on in the future?
I also get the impression that StackOverflow is not the only online community where this is happening. For example, Quora seems largely dead. Wikipedia is facing more threats than ever. And although Reddit’s traffic numbers don’t show it, I (and many other Redditors) get the impression that it’s also dying.
Example #2: open source
Tailwind CSS is a popular library programmers use to style and decorate their websites. In fact, according to the 2025 State of CSS Survey, Tailwind is the most popular CSS library, by far:
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