Living on stolen data and breaking the creator economy

A friend of mine has spent years building a high-quality DIY and recipe platform. Her business model was simple: valuable content in exchange for ad-supported traffic.
Since 2025, her traffic has collapsed. 📉

Why? She asked her own community.

The answer: people no longer visit her site — they ask ChatGPT for recipes and step-by-step instructions instead.

We are entering the zero-click economy in its most aggressive form. 🤖

This creates a dangerous paradox:

🔹 Value is created by individuals — through expertise, time, and investment.
🔹 Distribution is handled by AI — often without attribution or compensation.
🔹 Outcome: users get instant answers, platforms capture the engagement, and creators lose their revenue.

If we continue building AI on what feels like “stolen data,” we risk starving the very ecosystem it depends on.

If today’s creators disappear, what will AI learn from tomorrow?

This is not just a tech question — it’s a question of incentives.

Are we comfortable with a future where original sources become invisible, replaced by aggregators?

I’d love to hear your perspective:

👉 How should attribution and compensation work in the age of generative AI?