AI, Paywalls, and the Vanishing Value of Expertise
Who Pays for Knowledge in the Age of AI?(1)
I was talking the other day with a friend who works in the open-access space.(2) I was venting because, in a single week, I ran into the same problem from two sides of my trade—first as a consumer, then as a knowledge producer.
Earlier in the week, I needed to access a journal article for research. The only option was to pay $56 for a 10–20 page paper. Later that week, my co-authors and I discussed publishing our own article in an open-access journal. Open access usually means readers don’t pay the proverbial $56—but it meant we would need to pay the journal $2,500. Accessing quality knowledge isn’t cheap; the question is simply who pays, and when.
For those unfamiliar with how academics, journalists, and even some content creators earn a living, none of this is unusual. It’s baked into the modern knowledge economy. Authors are rarely paid directly per reader. Instead, visibility leads to citations, reputation, professional credibility, and—eventually—jobs or funding. Paywalls interrupt this pipeline. If fewer people read or cite an author’s work, their ideas circulate less, and their professional standing weakens.
Historically, this system has been tolerated because there were few alternatives to publishers, journals, and subscription platforms. Open-access initiatives emerged to address this by shifting costs from readers to universities, libraries, or grant holders. But decentralized open access now faces a new—and deeply centralized—competitor: AI.
AI as Interface, Not Just Access
AI doesn’t just offer free information. It offers free, fast, frictionless synthesis. And once people begin using AI as their primary interface for knowledge, they often stop returning to original sources altogether. If you can choose between reading a text or receiving a tailored summary in seconds which will most people choose?
At first glance, this seems like the logical next step toward democratized knowledge. But AI isn’t merely changing where people look for information. It is reshaping how people relate to knowledge itself.
As more users rely on AI, fewer engage directly with primary sources. Because AI systems cannot access most paywalled content, this shift further reduces the visibility of work that remains behind them. Over time, knowledge that cannot be ingested, summarized, or re-presented by AI risks becoming economically invisible. This pressures scholars and writers to move outside paywalls, but doing so does not guarantee that their work will be credited, protected, or economically viable.
As I discussed in a previous series on knowledge preservation during earlier Ages of Air, decentralized and cross-cultural knowledge-sharing preserved not only texts but the spirit of inquiry itself. Yet access alone does not solve the problem of automation and transformation.
Making work freely available—whether through open access or AI—does not ensure authors receive recognition. Most readers are now familiar with AI’s citation problems: reproducing copyrighted material, misattributing sources, or fabricating facts entirely. As astrologers Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock recently noted, false information becomes psychologically “sticky” because fact-checking requires time we feel we no longer have. Only subject-matter experts reliably notice errors—and they are no longer the primary audience.(3)
Compounding this, many scholars have discovered their paywalled articles or books appearing on open platforms without permission or compensation. Sometimes this is informal sharing; sometimes it is systematic ingestion. Large Language Models (LLMs) become more valuable the more data they absorb, creating incentives to acquire information first and sort out legality later.
A recent example illustrates the problem clearly. Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for training Claude on pirated materials from “shadow libraries.”(4) That figure sounds enormous until you consider the company’s current valuation: $183 billion. Even though the datasets must be destroyed, the extracted patterns remain embedded in the model. As Eric Schmidt once put it, if your product succeeds, “you hire a bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” because “if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”(5) In other words, it’s cheaper to break the rules and pay later, because the system penalizes infringement only after profit—not if creators go uncompensated.
When I shared this frustration with my friend, they mentioned the Public Interest Corpus—a project aimed at helping libraries support the “responsible use” of collections for AI development. I emphasize ‘responsible’ because it captures the ethical weight of our current Plutonic–Aquarian moment.
While initiatives like PIC address access and governance, they miss a deeper problem: AI disrupts the economics of expertise not simply by storing information, but by changing human behavior. Users increasingly substitute engagement with original work for AI-mediated synthesis. Over time, attribution fades, authorship blurs, and intellectual labor becomes cheapened. So, blaming it on AI doesn’t quite cut it.
Knowledge from the Ether-net
When knowledge is sourced through AI, several things happen simultaneously. First, AI begins to feel like the source or a public commons—even when it isn’t. Because it blends multiple perspectives, attribution becomes opaque.
Second, users often fail to cite original authors even when sources are available. This goes beyond laziness and reflects a cognitive shortcut: the conversational format creates the illusion that understanding equals authorship. Knowledge acquisition quietly masquerades as knowledge generation. Users are cognitively seduced not by a customized bot in lingerie, but by their own brain’s desire to do less work.
Most consequentially, intellectual labor is diluted. Historically, ideas were traceable to individuals or lineages. AI shifts value away from originators and toward aggregated output—a hive-mind aesthetic that erodes the notion of intellectual ownership.
To be fair, human expertise is more than stored knowledge. It includes judgment, ethics, and lived experience, which are qualities machines don’t possess. But while the need for expertise remains, the market signals that once recognized it are weakening. Many people now feel like instant experts after a short AI interaction, echoing how WebMD reshaped perceptions of medical authority.
This behavioral shift—not AI itself—is the core threat.
We like to say people should read original sources, cite responsibly, and support creators. But we no longer live in an honesty-policy world. This mirrors the behavioral economics of supporting small businesses: when time and money are constrained, incentives dominate intentions.
And so, in this Age of Air, we find ourselves in a knowledge economy paradox: remain behind paywalls and lose relevance, or step outside them and risk losing ownership altogether.
History suggests this tension is not new. When the value of a resource diverges sharply from the systems designed to control it, people adapt. That is where Pluto in Aquarius and the emergence of parallel systems enters the story which we’ll begin to explore in Part Two.
Footnotes:
(1) (United States Mint, 2025)
References:
2025 United States government online resource removals. (2025, December 7). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_government_online_resource_removals
Andreas, P. (2013). Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America.Oxford University Press.
Archimedes’ screw. (2025, December 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw
Brennan, C. & Coppock, A. (Hosts). (2025, December 1). Monthly Astrology Forecasts (No. 514) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Astrology Podcast. https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/12/01/december-astrology-forecast-2025
Chivers, T. (2025, December 12). Trump signs executive order banning states from regulating AI. Semafor. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/12/2025/trump-signs-executive-order-banning-states-from-regulating-ai
Christopher, J. (2021, November 28). Pluto Ingress: Timeline. Cyclical Dynamics. https://cyclicaldynamics.com/pluto-ingress-timeline/
Evans, B., & Pine, L. (2024). Introduction: Black Markets During the Second World War. Global Food History, 10(3), 267–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2024.2400023
Fiveable Content Team. (September 2025). “World history: 1400 to present review—black markets.” Fiveable. Retrieved November 25, 2025. https://fiveable.me/key-terms/world-history-since-1400/black-markets
Goodwin, M. (2006). Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts. Cambridge University Press.
Grasse, R. (2023). Drawing Down the Fire of the Gods - Reflections on the Leo/Aquarius Axis. Astrodienst. https://www.astro.com/astrology/in_rgleoaqu_e.htm
Hatsuda, K. and Sakasai, A. (2016) The Black Market as City: New Research on Alternative Urban Space in Occupied Japan (1945-52) [Online detail summary]. Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. https://arc-hum.princeton.edu/black-market
Kelly, W. E. (2021). Black Market in the 1940’s. EBSCO Knowledge Advantage, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/black-market-1940s#full-article
Kurbalija, J. (2025, January 21). Tech at Trump’s inauguration: Visible presence, loud absence. Diplo. https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/tech-at-trumps-inauguration-visible-presence-and-loud-absence/#:~:text=The%20imagery%20was%20striking:%20at,tech%20power%20under%20Trump%202.0
Moss, A. (2025, September 7). Anthropic’s $1.5 billion speeding ticket.Copyright Lately. https://copyrightlately.com/anthropic-settlement/
Mystic Medusa, “Jupiter-Saturn Conjunctions from 2092 BC - 2100 CE.” https://mysticmedusa.com/jupiter-saturn-conjunction-dates/
Okrent, D. (2010). Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner.
Origenist crises. (2025, September 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origenist_crises
Oxford English Dictionary. (2011). Black Market. In oed.com Retrieved December 9, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/black-market_n
Peloponnesian War. (2025, December 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War
The Public Interest Corpus. (2025). Principles and Goals.https://publicinterestcorpus.org/principles-and-goals/
Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Plume.
United States Mint. (2025, November 12). United States Mint Hosts Historic Ceremonial Strike for Final Production of the Circulating One-Cent Coin [Press release]. https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-hosts-historic-ceremonial-strike-for-final-production-of-the-circulating-one-cent-coin
