Free as in extraction: AI and the digital commons

Slide deck of a public talk titled 'Free as in extraction: AI and the digital commons' delivered online by Rohini Lakshané for the Future of the Commons on 22 October 2026.

Description of the talk: AI’s appetite for data is turning collective intellectual labour into private power. From Wikipedia and public archives to journalism and community histories, collectively produced knowledge feeds proprietary systems. Rohini Lakshané examines what this transformation means for the digital commons: the knowledge, infrastructure, and human labour that sustain a collaborative online world. Connecting the geopolitics of knowledge with feminist critiques of AI, she traces how automated systems erase authorship and political context, privilege dominant languages and perspectives, and devalue the work of volunteers and professionals. For marginalised communities, inclusion in training data can coexist with exclusion from decisions. Drawing on her work on online harms, particularly technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), she examines how AI increasingly enables and amplifies abuse through non-consensual synthetic imagery, impersonation, and gendered disinformation. She connects these harms to the silencing of women and marginalised communities, showing how safety, consent, and accountability shape who can participate in the commons. Moving beyond copyright disputes, the talk explores community consent, collective stewardship, benefit-sharing, and public investment in open infrastructure, arguing for a future in which the people sustaining the commons participate in its governance.