As the AI wars heat up every day, will data democratization aka open sharing of knowledge die?

Will classic content marketing die?

If an AI speaks to your audience instead of you, what is the point of sharing useful knowledge with everyone on the web? If content marketing was monetized by getting readers to know you, then how will that model hold going forward?

I was struck by this thought when I was recently using Open AI’s chatGPT myself to solve something. I’m sure that very good points of view on this topic exist. I just saw opinions on how AI is a great friend. So I wrote this.

Common Knowledge vs Expertise

Faced with a syntax error, and after 3 minutes of futile searching on the web, I fired up chatGPT and asked the question. It gave me an accurate and to-the-point answer (I’m not a programmer, just an annoying tinkerer).

ChatGPT was such a timesaver. There was no need to sift through endless Q&A on Stack Overflow and clickbait posts by countless others as was evident by the numerous results shown by Google. For a few minutes, in my eyes, a chatbot was more credible than all of those.

But, what chatGPT gave me was common knowledge… the one you don’t really need expertise for. Probably Google can give me that straight away as they release Bard. Bing is already on that path powered by Open AI’s GPT.

However, what if what I wanted was not common on the web today, but a result of someone’s hard-earned experience and expertise?

My next coding problem around a bad data structure illustrated this very point.  I asked both chatGPT and Google but I got common and generic answers. Not much help.

Then I ran into a comment by a developer who had faced a similar problem and he proceeded to explain multiple scenarios and why the problem occurred.

That helped me in a very good way because I was able to implement a well-thought-out solution (for a minute I even thought I could become a CTO if not a programmer).

The exact solution is not important here for this blog.

What’s important is that when the AI training data will have this content, I may have never come across this wonderful expert on the web.

So the real question is: Now that Open AI is charging $40 a month for access to insights it has received by doing a common crawl on public data, will the real experts see any of that monetization?

Is this piracy?

How to Handle this “Commoditization” arising from Data Democratization with AI?

For several years now we have used the word data democratization in a way to “unlock” the value of data and make it more accessible.

Democratization in the “enterprise” is about bringing out the insights that are trapped in the dark corners of our fragmented data repositories.

However, with AI, any discussion of data democratization outside the walled garden of an enterprise should now also include a discussion of “commoditization” and “monetization“.

Because it’s not just about access now. It’s about who ends up monetizing the content.

Is that beneficiary going to be the actual expert or the AI?

And so we get to the question of monetization of knowledge.

Monetization of Knowledge

So far, experts monetized their content by being found when someone needed help.

The monetization of knowledge was access to the audience, a way to generate leads, get the word out, reach new audiences, etc. And that often resulted in actual monetization downstream in dollar terms.

In this content publishing race, we’ve come to understand that doing something is tougher than knowing something.

And that has been the expert content monetization tactic of experts for a while. For example, I can show you in detail how to monetize your partnerships, but it’s unlikely that more than a few of the readers will be able to actually do so. The same is true of any other area such as digital marketing, SEO, sales, product management, and so on.

But with AI and AI-enabled programmatic automation now here to take matters into its own hands, how does that monetization work for the various experts who have been sharing insights and knowledge for free?

Will experts sharing their expertise ever be found now? Will AI credit its learning to the sources it got its intelligence from?

Should Experts Put Knowledge Behind a Paywall for AI?

This question was still relevant with Google, but it’s even more pertinent now.

As various AI models become the front end to the customer, are experts better off charging for access to their expertise?

One way is for experts to put limitations on the training data that AI can access so the AI can point to them instead of giving the answer itself.

But wouldn’t that be Google all over again?

Does democratization now mean that data access must be controlled?

Will this Accelerate the Idea of Data Licensing?

For several years we have debated how nothing is free. Companies (e.g. Facebook) monetize our personal data (interests, behavior). Although we still benefit in terms of free access to a very valuable service.

Facebook is actually already ahead of the game by allowing creators and experts to monetize their original content.

But that’s with the old model when “you” are still relevant as an expert.

However, when AI crawls your data and then takes over as the expert, this model becomes obsolete. So we need to take a fresh look at data ownership models.

In addition to personal data and behavioral data, should you “license” your expertise so that AI can crawl it. I believe this will become more common as a direct monetization strategy.

And then AI will be a welcome and cost-effective face of our customer experience. AI won’t cut out anyone.

Is Everything Lost?

Content marketing is still valuable of course. AI is not taking over the world yet.

So long as you have an audience to reach, publishing content helps you build brand awareness, and establish your thought leadership.

The way to monetize knowledge is to create original content that offers true insights. That will help you stand out just like the expert who solved my problem.

In a way, the bar for credibility is being raised again to how it was before internet publishing. You had to have a good value proposition before it could see the light of the day with earned media.

What’s Next?

Letting someone else take over the interface for the consumer is a risky bet. So keep publishing good content. Use AI to help you make it better as you democratize your data. It’s great at that.

But don’t get too comfortable like the travel agents in 2005.

Because powered by power, AI can always learn without you.