Trading off-line dollars for digital dimes

When Yahoo! News scraped the web. When Google Search takes the first paragraph of a top result. Digital platforms, building micro-content experiences on the backs of content creators and copyright owners, and not compensating them a bit for it.

But this micro appropriation, a.k.a. snacking phenomenon, reduces offline dollars into a digital dime’s worth of information. It seems free and maybe it’s useful for a lot of basic search, but consuming micro-bits of info teaches us to devalue knowledge and accept the first answer we get as fact. “It’s on Google. It’s a thing.”

Facebook scraping local news sites with the mission of “becoming the town square of the world” put local news out of business and in doing so, threatened the fourth estate responsible for putting a check and balance on local state houses and judiciary. If you’re upset that many citizens today have no clue about civics, or the way government operates, you can thank Yahoo! News, Google News, other scraping sites, etc. for the demise of local news and loss of intrepid local reporters who used to cover school board meetings. 

I see it happening now. With artificial intelligence. Training LLM‘s by using people’s content and worst, publishing that content, that we once paid for.

I remember, as a low level employee at a major news cooperative, sitting in a Townhall meeting and hearing the ambitious, optimistic CEO, proclaim the new digital era when “content yearns to be free.” And I wanted to get up and slap him in the face for mortgaging the cooperative’s members and propping up Google and Yahoo and everybody else over dues-paying news publishers.

Back in the 2000s our judiciary made choices like standing up for Section 230 and enabling Search Engine innovation at the expense of those building meaningful, longer-form content. 

Thousands of journalists had to give up their craft and become press agents for corporations. Then mobile phones showed up and social media arrived and now we have school shootings, disenfranchised youth and a culture that lacks trust in institutions and worse, in other citizens walking down the street.

So now at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age, I urge our judiciary not to make the same mistakes. Not to look starry eyed into the digital future, or to fancy themselves as .com innovators. But instead to be super skeptical and land on the side of culture and process and craft and society and humanity. For those who are writing and creating products and services that help and entertain people and want to earn a living for it.

I’m not being miserable or being against artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to innovate software and code in this way should have free reign to do so. But they shouldn’t do it by appropriating other peoples content or their identities.

Artificial intelligence is a copy / paste job today happening at a scale and speed that the human eye can’t detect. It’s no wonder that we don’t really believe plagiarism is a problem anymore. That’s because our courts are letting machines plagiarize every day billions and trillions of times a second, and re-mixing and reconfiguring those photos, images and words Into new combinations that make them barely perceptible as copyrighted material, and then to remix them and water them down and put them in a blender so that they have far less value to society or to people, or to knowledge that they ever had in their original form. 

Online dimes are now what we get from theft of off-line dollars. No one should be allowed to use a printing press, a website or an artificial intelligence engine to copy and paste someone else’s work without attribution, and even worse to resell that work, to prop their own profits. It’s cheating and theft at the expense and cost of society.

If content yearns to be free, then that’s a human activity of reading, thinking, and then speaking or writing, but it's in the domain of people to communicate with their bodies and minds, their hands and their voices. Gossip is allowed. Writing a derived work is okay. But letting a machine do it at undetectable scale isn’t the same as art. It’s billions of copy paste jobs in the flicker of an eye, no art, purely artificial. And that’s theft that weakens society. We let this happen in 1999 when .com sites lied about their margins, and again in 2012 (and in 2017 and 2021 and in 2023) when Facebook lied about its impact on teen mental health and child trafficking. Now is our chance to stop this theft and outlaw digital content piracy and AI will engineer once more.