A Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist says artificial intelligence could do to the scientific literature what landlords did to English farmland centuries ago: fence it off and take it for private use.
P. K. G. Williams, of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and the Smithsonian, laid out the argument in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 19. The paper treats the scientific literature as what it calls an “information commons,” an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.”
Economists and political theorists have long studied commons of this kind. Much of that thinking grew out of the history of common lands in places like preindustrial England, where villagers shared pasture and fields that no single person held. Williams uses that history as a starting point for his main concern, which is what happened to those lands.
They no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Williams points out that the usual explanation, the so-called tragedy of the commons, is not the cause. Instead, he credits the enclosure movement, which ran from about 1600 to 1800 and turned common land into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft on a societal scale, he writes.
That history is the lens for his central claim. Williams argues that AI supplies exactly the tools needed to enclose the information commons in a way that was not practical before. He is careful to say the process does not work the same way as physical enclosure. Still, he says it shares two defining features: it converts a shared resource into private wealth, and it undermines the social systems that keep the commons alive.
Williams describes one mechanism as “slop spam,” a term he uses to refer to low-quality, mass-produced content that floods the systems people rely on. The abstract does not spell out how that content would be produced or distributed in detail, and the paper's full text is needed for that level of analysis.
The paper is written as a primer. It reviews the history of the commons and the economic and political frameworks used to study them, then applies those frameworks to the modern information environment. Williams says the concepts can offer a scholarly basis for a feeling many people share: that AI may be more than a “smash-and-grab” of existing knowledge. He suggests it could be an attack on a whole way of life built around shared information.
Williams also stresses the value of what is at stake. He describes information commons as robust and immensely valuable, and says some of them rank among humanity's greatest achievements. The scientific literature, in his telling, is not a minor resource that can be easily replaced.
The paper is listed under the categories of Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics and Computers and Society. It was first submitted on October 19, 2026, and carries the arXiv identifier 2610.27251. The author's submission history shows a single version so far.
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