Let's be clear about what AI firms have a right to from websites ...
In fact, they have a *right* to nothing. Zero. The empty set. Nada.
The Internet and Web developed on a relatively open model, opt-out for web
crawling,
most content available for free, almost entirely on the basis of open linking
and
the "value exchange" that search engines returned to sites that they indexed and
provided traffic back to.
Generative AI as currently deploying is much more of a "take and give
nothing in exchange" proposition, where the AI firms are slurping up the
data and creating new answers that obscure the source of their
information and often give nothing of any value back, not even traffic,
in return.
Yes, I'm pleased to see that there are moves to provide some links back
to source material in generative AI answers, but it is unclear how
useful these will be or how many users will actually use them. In
effect, the AI firms are asserting that they simply DESERVE to get all
of this data for free, because, what the hell, the Net has been pretty
open up to now.
That line of reasoning won't wash, and in particular Google's arguments
that anything that they can access, including copyrighted materials, that
haven't been specifically opted-out by the relevant sites, is (or should
be) fair game for AI training, is self-serving hogwash.
Opt-out via robots.txt will help. But it is only a tiny part of the
situation. I am an enormous fan of AI (and I'll note that I know some
great people working on AI at Google, I've even worked with some of them
there). I want AI to succeed at bringing benefits to the world, and not
be unnecessarily hobbled by a regulatory and political firestorm of
understandable reactions to the firms' pushing way too hard and way
too fast.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
T2: https://t2.social/laurenweinstein
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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