I take comfort in knowing that it will be impossible for “AI” tools—here on out—to differentiate between human-made and machine-generated content, thereby inevitably feeding on their own regurgitations. It’s already happening, of course.
Over the next few years, while these “AI” companies try to sort that out (and fail), and search engines try to index only the sites that are what any reasonable person would consider genuine (and fail), the best thing we can all do is just create what we want while ignoring their problems, because they’re not our problems.
We have limited time and energy. Why spend it lacing our art with poison for AI scrapers? Why spend it focusing on how to stand out on platforms that can’t differentiate human-made from AI-generated? Why spend it publishing our new creations alongside AI-generated content? Don’t spend time on these things. These are all just busywork tasks that slow us down from doing what we really want to do: create.
These companies are actively destroying themselves, but they aren’t destroying the web.
If we all build our own places, we can live the dream of the web, now. We can create the web that was always meant to be. By connecting our websites together by—spoiler alert—linking to the people who inspire us, we build a stronger web than a search engine can index, one that won’t be littered with content we can’t control.
We can have the web we want by relying on each other, rather than companies.