In the past few weeks, I've noticed an insane uptick in traffic to this blog. Normally I'd be thrilled that more people are finding my ramblings to be coherent and plausible (yes I'm an influencer at last) except that I have no idea where the traffic is coming from.
At least until I saw one source was ChatGPT.
Crap.
The onslaught by our tech overlords to insert their Artificial Intelligence bots into every crevice of the Internet - Gemini on Google, Copilot on Microsoft products, whatever the hell they call it on Apple devices - is creating an environment where anything posted on the Internet can get vacuumed up by these AI bots as use in someone else's work. Without citing sources or providing links to the original work, and in the case of artists and musicians (and even professional writers) failing to pay them for their work. Violating copyright laws left and right.
So let me state here, loud and clear.
I did not give consent, I DO NOT give consent, I WILL NOT GIVE CONSENT TO HAVE MY WRITINGS USED WITHOUT CREDIT TO MY EFFORTS.
I'm not making any money off this blog, so I can't claim loss of revenue. But I do claim my rights as the person who wrote this junk to get cited by others referencing what I've written. These are my thoughts and opinions and I'm damn well entitled to defend them.
What bothers me is how these AI systems could well go after my published writings, the stuff I have as ebooks. THAT is a source of revenue, I should get paid for what's on the market, and if anybody steals "Road Trip to Vegas" or "The Brides of WiFi" I will be very vexed indeed.
I'm reading up now on how to block AI scavengers from this blog. I've gotten as far as "robots.txt" but I have no idea how to apply to a Blogger site. If anyone's got pointers, please help.
And to the Silicon Valley thieves who think they can take everything and leave us with nothing: Please die in a fire. It's the least YOU can do to save the world from your greed.
6 comments:
AI seems like a scam to me. Do I really need a short summary of my search term when I use Google? No, I knew that before I typed it. And don't even get me started on the robots I have to navigate on the phone...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
https://securityboulevard.com/2025/05/how-to-stop-ai-from-scraping-your-website/ has a good outline of approaches. I have used most of these up to "Method 3: Implement technical barriers", to block all bots I can identify using user-agent headers (note: some may use a fake header...). How to do this on a blogger site is a good question though. Apart from robots.txt (which is IMO untrustworthy since it will not stop bots that ignore it), I don't know a way other than the "technical barriers" approach, which at least requires e.g. that (1) you setup a custom domain name and front-door web server site that can block bots and let other user-agents through to your site (e.g. by redirecting the requests you want to go through, and using URL Masking to hide the fact that the request was redirected). Not a simple solution, but not too complex either if you have some server-side scripting skills e.g. using PHP.
AI = "Artificial Imitation / Artificial Insanity".
Re "AI" in general, protection from it will soon be a full-time job for most that care, which is actually a great signal to whoever might want to develop BADAAS (Blocking AI Dingbats As A Service) tools. "AI" is nothing more than gussied-up ML (machine learning) based tools, good for automating complex tasks (and some that humanity can benefit from), but still just a machine, and like many modern conveniences, making it too easy to trade our autonomy and economic value for those conveniences.
Isreal, I figured out the robots.txt step and implemented it. I'm going to see if the traffic decreases (in a good way, all humans and hyperintelligent life forms from Alpha Centauri are welcome to continue reading this blog).
Facebook was accused of using pirated e-books to train it's AI. So your books could have been used without your consent to train their AI.
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