Apparently, Google has changed their privacy policy and now says that they’ll scrape everything you post online to train their AI tools. I post my Fiction online on Substack and my WordPress blog and now wonder if this is a bad idea.
What makes me most mad about this Google “will scrape what you post online to train AI tools” thing is the gall of them to claim they have the right to do so. They index the Internet, they DON’T own it. I pay for hosting fees, I write the content. It’s like a postman taking things from your house just because he delivers things to your address.
It’s fine if they open a programme calling for data sets submissions with compensation.
It would’ve been fine if they were a company that created Internet tools with ethics in mind.
No, it’s “all your content are belong to us”.
I struck up a conversation on Mastodon about this, and I was hoping someone would come along to tell me that I’m panicking for no reason. But no, most of the responses I got was a resigned “acceptance” that there was no stopping them.
I think the worse thing about this is how some folks who work in tech are rolling their eyes at our reactions.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of empathy some #tech bros have about the whole “Google is scraping content to train their AI” thing. Lots of people defending Google in tech forums, saying this has been done forever so why are we being such a baby about it?
Maybe because all they can think about is $$ they can get from us content producers and we’re standing in the way of that. All that yummy free content that they could mind and we have the gall to complain about being plundered so they could earn money from our labour? Pfft! We’re so entitlted, us content creators!
I feel like the Internet is devolving faster than my emotions can keep up.
Wondering if there’s a way to protect my content more if I use WordPress or Substack now that Google is openly admitting what we have suspected they have been doing all along.
I heard that paywalls/subscriber only walls can deter them?
What do you think writers can do to protect their content? Or should we just roll over and accept that this is the way things will be from now on?
Read: Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI
Elizabeth Tai 
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