From Competition to Collaboration: Designing Sustainable Mechanisms Between LLMs and Online Forums

While Generative AI (GenAI) systems draw users away from (Q&A) forums, they also depend on the very data those forums produce to improve their performance. Addressing this paradox, we propose a sequential interaction framework in which a GenAI system proposes questions to a forum that can publish some of them. Our framework captures several intricacies of such a collaboration, including non-monetary exchanges, asymmetric information, and incentive misalignment. We instantiate the framework via large-scale simulations on Stack Exchange data and open-source LLMs. We demonstrate the incentive misalignment empirically, yet show that players can achieve about half of the estimated full-information benchmark. Our results highlight the potential for sustainable collaboration.