I wrote a few days ago about my personal take on AI being trained on my writing. Although I expected much more anger, hence the rather long block at the bottom, I am happy to see some nice responses and some pushback on the ideas. It sparked several emails, a few text messages, and one very well-thought-through response post.

Erlend on Mastodon raised a very good point when considering other people’s choices:

the way it’s been now, those who would like to choose differently than us, don’t get that opportunity. And I find that problematic.

Which is a very good point. My post was a very personal response to the swirling emotions on this topic, and I had considered other people’s websites. Everyone should, of course, have the choice of whether their data is used or not. Something that isn’t a revolutionary idea, but one that seems to cause issues being enforced on the internet. The EU is making the most, if sometimes misguided, progress on this front with GDPR and the wider DMA.

I particularly enjoyed David Pierce writing and talking about robots.txt. The long-time effort to stop bots from crawling your website, which of course is no more than a handshake agreement with no legal standing - and therefore is of very little use. This leads me to think there may be some way to do it in the future, but I always come back to my original point.

Of course, you should have a choice, and the ability to block what is done with the things you post online, but it takes effort to lock them away if you so wish. Make your account private and put your posts behind a paywall; that should do it. However, your ‘reach’ will be extremely limited, and you might not get the result you want. Users have always been able to copy and paste your words, right-click and save your images; this is just the way it is, and it all comes down to you, and what you want to do - there’s a trade-off with everything.