A short while ago I posted about users being very disgruntled over the approach Stack Overflow had taken to basically sell their users knowledge to OpenAI…

Well, I was surprised today to receive the following in an e-mail from Experts Exchange

Don’t get me wrong, Experts Exchange has its issues which I’ve mentioned here in the past, but I was none the less impressed to see this come across my e-mail client today!

It is nice to see a company that was taking a firm stand against AI and instead decided to protect their users’ intellectual property (content) from being harvested. It’s refreshing to know that they were able to weigh the ‘profit from an AI partnership’ vs ‘user rights’ and make the proper decision.

It was also funny to see them start off their e-mail by taking a nice shot at Stack Overflow for the way they chose to go about things completely differently and sell out all of their users! Always interesting to see the different paths businesses take when confronted with the same choices.

So this may be one important reason to consider Experts Exchange for your forum needs vs other forum (not just Stack Overflow)! Think long and had about how companies use your contributions for their benefit without compensating or even recognizing your contribution!

So at least one company seems to have moral and ethical fibers, which is an extremely rare commodity in today’s IT world! This proves that Morals and Ethics can be part of business! Businesses do not have to take advantage of their users at every turn like sooooo many of them do!!! It is a conscious choice that they intentionally make.

Also, if a company/forum has not taken a formal position on the subject, perhaps waiting on the sidelines to see what will come of all of this, then they are in fact supporting AI harvesting of your data (even if unintentionally) because unless they take active steps to stop it from happening, AI companies have most probably already harvested the data already!

Now The Reality Check!

The reality of today’s WWW is the simple fact that there is no true way to stop BOTs/AI/Web Scrapping Tools, … from harvesting any site!

No standard exist. Many push using robot.txt, but there is no guarantee that harvesting tools respect such instructions. Beyond which, there are new bots always emerging that would not yet be excluded via the robot.txt and thus would have the right to fully harvest the content of any site. It is sad that bots/ai/… all work on an opt-out principle, instead of a moral and ethical opt-in approach! This alone demonstrates the bot/ai/… creator’s intent where they don’t even get permission to take your content even when copyright notices exists! In their minds: ‘it is publicly accessible and thus open for us to take as we please’. So are books from the library, yet it is copyrighted and illegal to merely reproduce/use without permission and acknowledgement (at least where I live)!!!

Add to that the fact that content such as mine has some advertising to generate a little revenue from my works to keep my site going (pay hosting, domain renewal, …). AI simply takes it all without providing/replacing this lost revenue. Oh they make their money, but they don’t compensate the original content creator for their losses.

So while I applaud Experts Exchanges stand, no, I do not believe for a second that they truly have any means to actually enforce their stand and prevent BOT/AI content harvesting.

Add to that the fact that BOTs and AI have been harvesting for years now, so the content is probably already in various multinational databases, prior to them taking this formal stand. All they can do now, is try to block new content from being taken and this, IMHO, is nothing more than wishful thinking with the way the web is today.

Sadly, the laws that govern this stuff are decades behind and most (if not all) politicians don’t have the first clue when it comes to this stuff! Until which time they pass laws forcing opt-in consent, most companies will simply continue to do as they please with complete impunity!