The "win-win" genAI answer engines should strive for

Tim O'Reilly wrote a concept-rich piece that I found incredibly novel and refreshing. Lots of ideas in Tim's article, and the one that stuck is best captured here:

"... in the long term, if people stop creating high quality content to ingest, the whole ecosystem breaks down. This is not a battle that either side should be looking to “win.” Instead, it’s an opportunity to think through how to strengthen two public goods. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis put it well in a response to an earlier draft of this piece: “It is in the public good to have AI produce quality and credible (if “hallucinations” can be overcome) output. It is in the public good that there be the creation of original quality, credible, and artistic content. It is not in the public good if quality, credible content is excluded from AI training and output OR if quality, credible content is not created.” We need to achieve both goals."

It is stated so clearly that it sounds obvious... but only after seeing it.

O'Reilly Answers is making it happen: "Because we know what content was used to produce the generated answer, we are not only able to provide links to the sources used to generate the answer, but to pay authors in proportion to the role of their content in generating it." I hope this approach gets adopted broadly.