Sarah Gilbert argues that unpaid volunteer moderators are what currently keeps platforms such as Reddit and Wikipedia at roughly 5% AI-generated content, far below the estimated 16% AI-generated share of the internet overall. She warns that without sustained volunteer effort, platforms face a dual crisis of declining information reliability as AI content crowds out vetted material, and of fraying community trust as users struggle to verify whether they are interacting with humans. Gilbert calls on platforms to better compensate and support moderators and to fund research into AI-detection tools.
