I’ve been publishing my research and opinion pieces on the web for over twenty years. Since Fall 2017, here on AmericanDelusions.com. The topics have ranged from family events and local hometown matters to a wide range of topics in economics, capitalism, politics, society, the environment, and more. All of this has been openly available to anyone who comes to my websites.
Now, my work may be subject to the website scraping conducted by AI systems like ChatGPT, Bing, and others. There are claims that this has been used to create 150 billion “tokens” (words or word fragments) that are the basis for the probabilistic guessing that these AI packages perform. No one really knows exactly what was scraped or not because the developers have kept this secret.
The message in the footer explicitly sets them on notice that I will not agree to unauthorized data mining on this site. I do not agree that their for-profit exploitation of my work without compensation is OK.
Agree…it is theft but how to track, enforce?
Very tricky problem. Although it is relatively easy to track down exactly which server and domain provides information (excepting the dark web), the ownership of the information is not so easy. Like corporations and finance around the world and dark money in politics, anonymity and downright deception are commonplace on the web. See my earlier comment “End Anonymity” In this situation the central fact about AI, as it is currently being developed, is that it is controlled by huge corporations and will be deployed to their top and bottom line benefit, not the betterment of humanity’s knowledge.