If you follow me on X you might have read a few posts about locking content already. In this post series I want to raise awareness for the problem, showing you why this is inevitable, the benefits and how I did it with free tools, so you could do the same with your site(s).
I’m a strong believer of sharing knowledge for free. Knowledge shouldn’t be locked but available for anyone to learn from, so everybody has to chance to prosper from the world’s knowledge. Sadly the world has changed.
AI companies are stealing the worlds knowledge, repurposing it and spitting it out as their own without paying nor crediting the original authors from whom they stole the knowledge from. This happens without any (or barely any) fact checking. Your initial idea, or the ideas of many, might get twisted and spit out as ‘answers’ from those AI models in a way the original author didn’t meant it or even completely wrong.
All those big companies try to make the rules, they not only control what questions are allowed and how the answer should look like, they can also limit or even block access to all the stolen knowledge at any time. That’s the complete oposite of sharing knowledge for free. If you spin this further you end up quickly in some dystopia where only large syndicates and very rich and powerful people have access to the world’s knowledge.
Who are those AI companies?
They are Google, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp), X (Twitter) and many others, to just name some of the biggest players currently.
They are scraping the open web and their own platforms and use the data to train their AI models. Yes, this doesn’t only apply to websites. If you are creating content on open platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Medium, X etc etc, you are not only dependent on the goodwill of those companies, but you are also inviting AI companies and their scraper to steal your content for free.
What you are producing today is helping to make your creations obsolete in a few years. At most.
Sounds scary? Well, it is.
I could rant here for hours, but I think you got the point. AI models need training data, lots of training data. This training data comes from what you create. They are stealing it from you without asking or crediting or paying you. They train large models that should gather the worlds knowledge similar to the library of Alexandria to charge you later for having access to the knowledge you helped creating. Sounds ridiculous, right?
All the fun we have with AI, but this is nothing we would want.
In the next post I show you what we all can do to counteract this.