Please & Thank You

I’m sure that many of you who read this blog regularly will have seen this Washington Post story which uncovered where various AI tools are getting their ‘smarts’ from, and tried entering your domain name into the interactive search tool near the bottom.

Of course, this site as well as two old ones of mine (now both shuttered) are in the list.

While many folks are — rightly — up in arms about this, the blunt reality is that in a lot of cases sites have been inviting this scraping for years, if not decades, thought the pursuit of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and the belief that doing so increases our visibility online.

Is it any wonder that the AI tools have so much data, when we’ve been conditioned to hand it over on a shiny platter?

Perhaps it’s time to vote with not only our feet, but our ROBOTS.TXT and site headers. Starve those companies who don’t respect us of the data they crave. Not just own our words, but devise new ways to connect with each other that don’t rely on middlemen.

Something to think about.