Referencing an imaginary 'social contract' that is violated by AI
I just wanted to express full agreement and solidarity with Stephen Downes' view of how and why we should put things on the internet (emphasis added).
“The open web is under attack by AI bots that steal web publishers' content,” writes Nate Hake on some travel blog site. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but it’s referenced by Paul Prinsloo and is yet another article referencing an imaginary ‘social contract’ that is violated by AI. “In the past,” writes Hake, “search engines and platforms sent real human users to websites. Today, they increasingly send AI bots instead.” But search engine traffic matters only if you run advertisements on your site; for people like me, the traffic sent by Google, say, is just traffic I have to pay for. That’s why I’m happy to syndicate my site on RSS and social media; it’s good for me if people read my stuff elsewhere. So I don’t mind if AI bots crawl my site (provided they don’t amount to a DOS attack) and my only real desire would be to have AI credit me with an idea if it happens to originate with me. But even this isn’t part of any ‘social contract’. Sure, if you don’t want AI to crawl your site, block it (or turn over control of the internet to Cloudflare, your call). To me, sharing the ideas is what counts, and sharing is not transactional and not based on any social contract.
Source: Downes.ca
Image: Gaku Suyama