I'm not fully familiar with all the players that operate in these spaces, but as far as I know, many of the players in the open ecosystem are not heavily funded. Majority of the players in the open ecosystem are small groups or individuals , which means they will not have the funding to compete with the corporations that are funding the LLMs and profiting greatly off of them. Moreover, due to the nature of an open ecosystem, many of the players may even be at odds with each other or carry differing opinions on how to tackle this issue. This suggests that any sort of collective effort to combat this will be difficult in the open internet ecosystem due to lack of cohesion

I liken this to how the robber barons operated in the US after the turn of the 20th century. Back then, the free market was so free that it operated as a "wild west" with little regulation. This allowed for richer and larger individuals and companies to dominate the market, buying out and swallowing all competition with sheers market share and economic power and pressure. In this context I believe that the companies backing these LLMs operate in a similar manner. There are little to no regulations in the online space, and these corperations are taking advantage of that to squeeze out or buy up competition. For example, as a small animator, it is increasingly hard to compete with AI animation, and when combined with the monetary drive for many people to create AI animations quickly compared to manually animating, it will slowly choke out the market for traditional animators. With no regulation, the "robber baron" econoy we saw historically will return to take over the online space

This is an interesting thought. While I do agree that it would be possible to effectively push back if the masses work towards this one similar goal, I find it to be an unrealistic thought experiment. While the open web came about through community involvement, it was not in an ecosystem that had an active adversary fighting in the opposite direction. Moreover, I would posit that the co-operative spirit amongst the general populace online is generally weaker now than it was in the 90s and 2000s with how combative online spaces have become. I imagine it is a taller task in the modern day to get people to rally behind one cause, which would be necessary for a collective effort like fighting back against LLMs