| > To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall. > It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password. That also creates friction for new users, discoverability issues, and additional privacy concerns for people wanting to access your content. > I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. Even the ones that do provide attribution and links back to the original source? Perplexity does a good job of that, for example. > As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more. Well, yeah, if you're blocking the content from being accessed without a login, you're blocking it from being indexed by search engines. I guess I'm a little confused as to what your ultimate goal is. If you're putting content up on the web for free, what are you gaining by blocking AI from indexing it, especially when you're blocking actual users, whether they discover it via AI or traditional search? I understand the frustration at seeing AI tools digest your content and then repeat to users without connecting it back to your site. But that's something that other people have always been doing independently of AI -- people read articles, learn facts or understand new ideas from them, and then incorporate them into their general assumptions to be expressed in their own work without necessarily acknowledging, or even recalling, where the underlying information that informed their thinking came from. People have been writing articles and producing various forms of media content that are inspired by other people's unattributed work since time immemorial. Yes, AI accelerates that process and makes it more visible to you, so I understand where the frustration is coming from. But consider that the expectation that everything that happens downstream of your work will always be attributable back to you may never have been a reasonable one in the first place. |