AI Stole My Content and I Don’t Feel Good About It (Premium)

As a content creator, I see both sides of the AI debate. My experiences using Microsoft Copilot Pro have been nothing but positive, for example, and this product has saved me time and money. But generative AI's need to suck up as much content as possible and then spit it back out without compensating the original creator is a troubling new development in the age-old battles over copyright and fair use. Indeed, it's so troubling that it may require new laws and regulations.

This topic is curiously controversial with some, but this is my livelihood, so I see it as straightforward: Content creators should be paid for their work, and generative AI providers like OpenAI and Microsoft should pay them like Google Nes and other news aggregators do. There is no version of the term "fair use" that protects these firms: Arguments that generative AI is somehow "transformative" are immaterial given the massive and unprecedented scale of this theft of content and the financial reasons for it. Regardless, this isn't about AI transforming copyrighted, protected content. It's about AI consuming it without permission and then regurgitating it without compensation. That's theft in the same way that selling a bootleg DVD on the streets of New York City is theft.

Tied to this, I have watched our revenues from ads collapse over the past year---they're down to almost literally one-third of what they were a year ago---I assume it's obvious to almost everyone that AI will only exacerbate this problem by not pushing their users through to the source material, which will impact traffic. Theoretical arguments about copyright, fair use, the rule of law, or whatever aren't just uninteresting in this case, they're insulting. This is a real problem, even if it does not impact you directly.

And now, like The New York Times, I have a bit of experience that makes the theoretical a reality. There's an AI out there, one I'd not heard of previously, that sucked up at least one of my articles---I assume it scraped my entire site---and is spitting out my content in response to user prompts.

Or is it? Let's take a look.

I received a very interesting email the other day from a person who noticed that one of my news articles was the first source of information for a prompt---Mozilla refocuses on AI---on Perplexity AI, a service with free and paid tiers that, among other things, offers what can only be described as a news feed. In fact, I suspect this is where the "prompt" I noted above came from. That is, it was likely automated by the system and not something a user got when prompting it.

Perplexity AI's take on Mozilla refocusing on AI cites 7 sources across its 8 paragraph summary of this topic, and my article is the source of the first two paragraphs. This makes a head-to-head comparison of the two interesting. And, as it turns out, depressing.

The first sentence of the first paragraph of the AI summary reads:
Mozilla has announced a significant reorganiza...