Some people are so upset about AI crawlers that they’re going to mute themselves in protest. I can sort of understand the impulse, but I don’t share it.
Yesterday, Rachel Kroll wrote:
In my travels of the “Fediverse”, I saw something a couple of weeks back which seemed to resonate with me. They had a problem with something, stumbled across one of those Stack Overflow sites, and found the answers lacking. They then did their own work, found “a much better answer”, and then didn’t post it.
They didn’t want to post to a Stack Overflow site because of “harvesters and scrapers digesting my answer and not giving me one cent or even credit”. Someone else replied with a similar take, and I realized that describes me and how I'm feeling these days.
I respect Rachel a lot, and am certainly not here to say she, or anyone, is “wrong” to feel this way. But if we’re talking about how we feel, I’m going to take up some space on my own blog to say I definitely don’t feel this way.
I always enjoyed making and publishing notes of my discoveries, on the mere chance that someone else in the Graph Mind would find them helpful or interesting. With rare exceptions, no one ever gave me “one cent or even credit” either. They didn’t before AI, and they don’t now. So what has changed for me? In almost thirty years of writing online — nothing, really.
Maybe it’s just that I never built a large audience. Maybe people who are better at this than I am (Rachel would certainly be one of those) have felt a huge drop-off in Signals of Interest from their writing; if that happened to me, I could certainly imagine resenting it. And of course, being in tech has always been wearisome in other ways which I do understand from experience. We were longing for the goose farm even before AI murdered Stack Overflow.
But from where I sit, it feels like there are still curious people online doing stuff and looking for human signal. It’s still possible to find them and make yourself known to them. It’s just that, in addition to that undiminished community, there are also, now, a lot of robots. If I close my eyes and think hard about how that makes me feel about wanting to write specifically: well, somehow I can’t detect that it makes any difference at all.