It's the era of AI, clearly. It's everywhere, the news, the blogs, the fediverse, you can't turn a corner in the computer landscape without encountering a post about it, good or bad. Praising their virtue or bashing their evils.
I've seen the posts about AI's energy consumption. I've heard the tales of the insane number of requests the scrapers make. I've used some AI tools for various reasons. I've got ideas about good use of AI. I've also got a bad taste in my mouth about AI.
Recently a judge declared that scraping books to train AI does not infringe copyright. I don't agree with this and think that copyright is copyright. Citing "fair use" because it never reproduces the full text seems tenuous. I think AI has its value, like sorting through lots and lots of data and filtering that based on criteria for a human to review. For example analysing cancer cells. A trained model could sift through many slides and filter out negative and positive. The positives are then handed to a human for verification. Of course, what if the model gets the negatives wrong? Well, therein lies the rub. It's not flawless, much like humans. A model is only as good as the data it's trained on really.
But I digress, this is about something I've been pondering with regards to posting things online. I used to write, blog, whatever you want to call it, but haven't so much in recent times. Having read online about the positives of writing, journaling, or putting thoughts down, I wanted to start again. Even just to straighten out my thoughts and put them onto some medium (why am I not writing on paper?). But the thought of some AI being trained on my ramblings feels icky. I don't think my work is valuable or anything, or even of much use, but having these bots mass scraping tons of data just feels wrong. On the flip side though, I am writing this, for free, on the internet for anyone to read, so why does it matter if it's a human or a bot?
Maybe I just need to find peace with this realisation and let it be. Let the bots come. Let them eat. Maybe the food will leave their tummies sore and their brains rotten.