When you take a break…

I haven’t blogged in nearly a year and a half, and now, as I’ve recommitted to blogging more regularly, I come to find out that my content can end up being used by AI. I’ve seen some content producers say that they’ve cut back on the amount of information they share on blogs and other social media channels because they are tired of seeing it stolen and used by AI without attribution or compensation.

Meanwhile, more and more businesses are embracing AI to produce content and other written materials, such as emails, social media posts, etc. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t get spam emails offering me AI training.

AI has changed our world

What is happening is that AI is going over everything in the public domain to answer queries and produce documents. It is also “learning” from your data and content.

AI may be taking over the world, but should it take over our intellectual property?

What differentiates my blog and any written material I produce is me—my experience, my creativity, my point of view. I choose how to write something, what to include, the angle it takes, and the tone it uses. It doesn’t seem right that AI could take what makes my writing unique to me and use it to recreate content for others to use. What can be done?

You need to protect your content

It turns out as content producers, we now must protect our websites and blogs from AI bots. Although AI is not supposed to use material that is copyrighted (you do have a copyright on your website, don’t you?), I am not sure that is stopping those bots.

It seems we have to go on the offensive and create actual obstacles for these bots.  Dave Morelo provides several actions you can take in the article How to Protect Your Website From AI Scraping. However, many of Morelo’s suggestions also mean reducing the visibility of your content. This will also impact your website and blog as it will most likely reduce visits, and maybe impact your SEO.

The bottom line is that right now we are living in the wild world of AI, and it has consequences for those of us who produce original content. We’ll  have to find a balance between protecting our content and allowing people to find it.