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Pulling my site from Google over AI training

tracydurnell.com

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#21
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directory sites and webrings were artifacts of the early web, when search engines were pretty bad. They disappeared once search got better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

I miss webrings. I don't think that search getting better killed them (they are useful for reasons unrelated to the state of search), but when personal and hobbyist websites started vanishing, webrings went with them.

Webrings were a great, essentially curated list of sites the authors of sites you liked thought you might also enjoy or find useful. I miss them, too.

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#22
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directory sites and webrings were artifacts of the early web, when search engines were pretty bad. They disappeared once search got better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

I miss webrings. I don't think that search getting better killed them (they are useful for reasons unrelated to the state of search), but when personal and hobbyist websites started vanishing, webrings went with them.

Ironically, once search got better for the users, there was no further need to build comprehensive sites with great content in the hopes of getting added to webrings and directories. All sites need to worry about after were getting backlinks.

After that, sites also stop linking to each other.

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#23
post #15

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

I don't see why it would be illegal, AI reading it should be no different from anyone else.

"Illegal" is too strong. But if you specifically disallow the use of your website contents from being used to train AI, then anyone doing so is violating the terms of service.

Which doesn't really mean anything.

At this point, the only defense I can think of is to not make the content publicly available. Which is what I've done.

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#24
post #3

> I’m going to start by pulling my websites out of Google search, then work on adding my sites to directories. Maybe I’ll even join a webring I'm curious, this is the first time I've heard of a webring, I'd like to learn more about these alternate discovery routes. Anyone have any concrete experience or recommendations to share?

Stop trying to make the rest of us feel old lol.

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#25

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

Why do you think it would be illegal? You can state "permission is not granted to X" on anything you want, but that doesn't mean the law is on your side. Regular rules of copyright still apply.

P.S. Permission is not granted to downvote my comment!

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about jamming along these lines, but the problem is that it's a game of whack-a-mole -- you have to keep up on what bots are active (robots.txt doesn't really help here, and focusing on Common Crawl is insufficient). My websites have been closed to the public since shortly after the release of ChatGPT, but I've been considering opening them up again, sort of. The not-logged-in experience being full of…

So if someone innocently reaches your site from google they will see a bunch of LLM generated misinformation? You have a legal right to do this (assuming the LLM bullshit isn't libel) but I don't see how it could be considered a moral act.

> So if someone innocently reaches your site from google they will see a bunch of LLM generated misinformation?

Yes, although I've been blocking googlebot for years, so nobody will get to my sites through google anyway.

> I don't see how it could be considered a moral act.

I'm curious about this -- why do you think this is in any way an immoral act?

If a naïve human comes across the site, they'll quickly realize that it's not useful and move on. No harm done. How does morality enter into it?

Would your moral objections be eased if the first line on the page is something like "this page is full of machine-generated nonsense. Please ignore it"?

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#27
post #15

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

I don't see why it would be illegal, AI reading it should be no different from anyone else.

[deleted]

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#28
post #15

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

I don't see why it would be illegal, AI reading it should be no different from anyone else.

This is the most braindead take and aibros keep pushing. Your 'AI' model is NOT A PERSON and therefore it is different.

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#29

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

Why do you think it would be illegal? You can state "permission is not granted to X" on anything you want, but that doesn't mean the law is on your side. Regular rules of copyright still apply. P.S. Permission is not granted to downvote my comment!

[flagged]

Re: Pulling my site from Google over AI training

#30

As a substack author, with “permission is not granted to use any portion of this to train an ai” at the bottom of most of my posts, it’s bullshit that you have to do this sort of thing, and that it will almost certainly not work This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?

It's only illegal if a law makes it illegal.

It's not clear to me that it should be illegal.

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