Google "Declaring War" On Content Creators?! (Podcast ep001)

Episode transcript

So that's why I think Google is declaring war to content creators because, let's be fair, if they use our content without permission, we should get paid. We should get paid for any AI model to use our content.
Hi, I'm Tiago, and welcome to the Stack Junction podcast, episode 1.
In this episode, I want to talk about something that I think means Google is declaring war to content creators and everyone that publishes content online.
This has been bothering me for several weeks, and I first found it in an article from Gizmodo a few weeks ago, and it's titled, 'Google says it'll scrap everything you post online for AI', and I think this move will break the internet.
I say break the internet with quotation marks because I think this will make the internet even more private, where you will have to sign up to read or pay to read content online even more than you do today.
I, myself, I will put even my articles on my blog behind the paywall. Not exactly paywall, but I will request members to sign up to read my articles, the full articles.
At least I will test this to protect myself from, from this kind of abusive behavior from big companies like Google and Openai. There are also other ai uh, companies doing this, scrapping the internet and this is not good.
So these AI models have a big problem because if you steal from someone, you are in infringing copyright. But if you steal from everyone, it's basically okay, because it's for AI training and it's available online. And I don't think this is correct. And this bothers me a lot.
The stealing of our content that we publish and they use for AI to reply and interact with ChatGPT, Google Bard and other stuff.
And another thing that bothers me, um, about this is it's Google. And Google has some history of trying to own the internet.
So, Google has search, and with search they have been making changes to give answers to people because "user experience" (user experience with quotation marks) and giving the answers straight away, their algorithm has lots of problems, but that's a topic for another day. But they are taking, uh, snippets and putting them on Google search, and this, I think, I'm not sure exactly, about a study behind this, but I think it decreases the number of clicks a website gets because people get the answer on Google and they don't need to click on a website. And other things Google have been trying to own the internet is Google Chrome, where you use the browser and they know basically everything you do on the browser.
So they use this to sell better ads. And Google in the past also had AMP. Which is Accelerated Mobile Pages, which was another thing that screwed up a lot of news websites in the past. And Core Web Vitals is another standard they developed to measure website speed and Good user experience online.
So, I think all these small things together is Google trying to own the internet and be the internet for what most people use it. And now scraping the content that is available online and free. Now they are taking this to their AI models and they will start using that content to give the answers for people's questions and and other stuff that we probably don't know right now.
So, that's why I think Google is declaring war to content creators because, let's be fair, if they use our content without permission, we should get paid. We should get paid for any AI model to use our content. First and foremost, that's what I think is fair.
We should also have the option to not allow AI companies to use our content without our permission. I think that's also fair. And if things were fair—keeping on the topic of fair—I think, we should have a model where we give permission and only then they can scrape or, crawl our websites and other stuff, not the other way around.
And my thoughts on ai, a while ago on Twitter was that AI search engines— I called AI search engines like ChaTGPT, Bard, and other stuff— will face legal trouble.
I think they will face the legal trouble because if we don't give permission and if we are not getting paid for them to use our content, it's stealing.
And if it's stealing, it's not acceptable. So, I think they will face legal trouble.
I wrote this in March, I think. I also, was already thinking that more content will go behind paywalls as a way to protect from this. And we will also see websites blocking bots.
And I, I see this already sometimes when I am signing up to some websites and or even doing some speed tests.
I've seen some bots being blocked on some websites.
So, as a way to defend themselves. Twitter, even a few weeks ago, blocked, bots by limiting the number of posts, people could see. So, it was already a way to defend themselves from scraping.
Reddit is also trying to defend themselves from bots scraping the platform and not paying.
Going back to my thoughts on ai, it was for me very, very obvious that they will face legal trouble. And in the past weeks, I also noticed the author Sarah Silverman suing Openai for scraping their books to train ChatGPT.
And, I wrote a note that otters are starting to fight back against large language models, which is one of the biggest problems of these models is that they are using copyright material to train the models and are violating such copyrights in the way.
So this, this move from Google is a douchebag move. Something that is not okay.
Something that I think will bring even more lawsuits against them. And as a way to defend, I will put my articles behind the signup, and test if it affects traffic too much. And I think other people should too. And if people can sue Google for using their copyright and they publish more important things that than me, that I publish, just reviews and some, some opinion thoughts.
They should go after Google for using their materials. And yeah, this, this was bothering me a lot, and I needed to make this rant to feel a little bit better and publish it online.
So, this was episode 1, and I will end the episode now, and I will be back in the future with another rant or a more structured idea if I have something that I want to share.
So, let me know what you think about this. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and also visit thestackjunction.com website. Where I publish a lot more than on YouTube and Twitter. So yeah. Thanks for watching and listening to this episode. Bye-bye.