AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

P. K. G. Williams argues that artificial intelligence poses a threat to the scientific commons—the shared body of scientific literature and knowledge that humanity has built—by enabling its privatization, similar to the historical "enclosure movement" that converted communal agricultural lands into private property. Rather than a temporary exploitation, AI-driven enclosure could fundamentally undermine the social systems supporting open science, including through the proliferation of low-quality data ("slop spam"). The paper frames this not merely as theft but as a potential attack on the foundational systems that have made science a collective human achievement.