We Always Knew Anyone Could Take Our Content

Published on August 29, 2024, filed under Everything Else (RSS feed for all categories).

Everyone who publishes on the Web knows that their content can be copied and used by anyone for any purpose.

The impact of this is influenced by the quality, popularity, and value of the content (no one steals bad content), and by one’s ability to detect and take action against theft and misuse.

This has always been a risk of providing content on the Web.

Over the years, this risk has moved from being a potential one to becoming more and more actual.

While there have been bad actors all along, the first major shift may have occurred with search engines: While these have forever featured content from websites to provide context for the respective results, that came with an unspoken agreement: I show your content, but you get the click.

Search engines broke this contract when they began featuring content in ways that reduced the likelihood of users visiting the original websites. Featuring content on a results page draws a fine line, but there is one.

Over the last years, we’ve been experiencing another major shift with AI actors gulping down web content to feed their models. For them, there is no contract and no line.

Here, the risk has turned into actual exploitation. AI actors would take our content, without our consent, without attribution, and use it for purposes we’re not being informed about and have no say about.

Adding insult to injury, AI actors use this content for their users to generate more content, which may compete with and bury our original material.

The topic is all over the Web, but this is how I would describe what has happened to what is the web contract. ^*

Personally, I see no amicable solution that wouldn’t require respect (for content creators and owners) and trust (in search engines and scrapers).

From here on, we likely end up with some laws and their enforcement. In the end, what AI and greed will have accomplished is to destroy a good part of the respect and trust we’ve still had on the Web. While this may already be clear to everyone, it doesn’t make it any more great.

^* …or a variation thereof. The web contract as I understand it here is based on respect for people’s content and their preferences for its use (as indicated through things like the robots exclusion standard), in return for allowing people to access and make fair use of it.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!