Serious question, as someone who recently started writing:
• How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?
• How do you guys feel about your thoughts, ideas and creativity being scraped and secretly added to the training corpus of AI models?
Letting a AI learn from your content devalues it as they can regurgitate it for a few dollars a month.
That doesn’t mean you can’t work to change the world, and in fact in order to do so you first need to see how it actually is.
But it does also means you need to decide which battles to fight.
These companies are violating that agreement for their own gain, and respond to any pushback by invoking bogus legal arguments and ridiculous machine anthropomorphism. Brute force statistical analysis is not "learning."
Serious shortcoming indeed.
I know it is stupid but I care.
I'm also worried that if I wanted to find an audience the audience would first have to navigate the AI search hall of mirrors.
as soon as i do something slightly spammy or excessive SEO-wise i get dinged for it. within 1-2 days. then i re-evalute what i did and revert it or change the strategy slightly.
those blogspam houses are just doing a few things right that are clearly being given too much weight.
and finding an audience was never easy. but social, newsletter, building free tools that link to your blog are some ways to do different than just SEO.
They both get traffic. Neither site is optimised for SEO. Looking at analytics (Matomo on my blog, Google Analytics for the bot), the stuff I write myself gets "real" visitors. People will stumble on a project, and you can see them navigate to the next article, and the next article.
The content from the bot isn't engaging - people might stumble on it, then bounce.
Absent search, interesting content gets shared. Blog spam does not.
I don't worry too much about my content being used to train LLMs - I don't feel it takes away from me, it a bit feels like content getting indexed by a search engine. And I see value, for me, in just creating it.
I have a blog that admittedly does not get much traffic, and I have started to add random words after each paragraph. The background is white, and these words are white, so they are invisible to most people. Maybe it is not that effective, but it makes me feel better.
- `add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘my_scramble_func’)`
- or `add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘my_scramble_func’)`
Wordpress is PHP so you get the power of doing whatever as the request loads.
`Template_redirect` would allow you to redirect to a specific template/page.
`the_content` would allow you to return different content for that path.
Then you just need to check the user-agent/IP. I’m sure there’s a PHP library you could install with composer to do this.
What would be fun in my opinion is leaving the metadata the same but replacing only the meat. For example article titled “How to Update Your Blog” would still have the title and headings, but then return “<h2>Step one: open your blog editor</h2><p>hajfineidif hahahe lorem ipsum…</p>” for the paragraphs.
On the other side, for many of my thoughts/ideas/creativity, I find it is often a question of, do I die alone with it in my head or put it out there, maybe for someone to find, use or be inspired by? If it's a question of one or the other, I think perhaps I'd rather let it go free so the value isn't lost (assuming, that what I have to write/say/share is of some value).
I have seen that mechanism be exploited.. sometimes you put something out there, someone uses it, and there is zero attribution/citation. For myself, I prefer to try (most of the time) to treat non-fictional writing in the traditional sense of an academic paper and include citations whenever they are useful and I can - even for non-academic purposes - for the purposes of giving credit to others. It's nice to share credit and show how things connect, IMHO.
FWIW, I like some of the inspiration behind Creative Commons, but even old school citations (MLA/ALA or heck, even just this kind of inline citation style [1] that is common on HN and other sites is better than zero).
There are citation generators online also [2] - for formal purposes/writing/papers you must get these formats right, but for informal/casual use, I think simple citation is better than no citation.
[1] simple citation style, or even just paste the URL - at least you're giving credit.
[2] example, https://zbib.org/