Is it possible to blog in the AI era?
I write short stories every now and then and I throw them online. I also have a tech blog, where I moan about the decisions software I use make and with my “infinite wisdom”, I tell them what they should be doing instead.
I used to host both on Medium, but Medium got greedy. Then it was WordPress, but now even they’re trying to be greedy bastards and use my shit for training AI.
Some would argue that WordPress paid hosting will exempt me from the AI training, but for less than 100 visitors a year, it’s not really worth the expense.
So what is the solution? I ask the greater minds of this community for suggestions.
WriteFreely is pretty nice, it uses the ActivityPub protocol and is thus a part of the Fediverse - just like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Host your own stuff. With this little load you can do it on your own hardware with very little resources.
Yeah, I was thinking about throwing something on my Raspberry Pi, but didn’t know if I’d open the door to more issues.
You could also spin up a $5 a month VPS somewhere like Linode.
It can be pretty secure if you host it behind a cloudflare tunnel. Then you don’t have to open any ports to the wild west
Thank you. I’ve heard so much about CloudFlare tunnels, but don’t know how they work. Do I just point it at an IP and port or is it much more complicated than that?
Basically you have to run a mini server (I use a docker container) called a cloudflare endpoint. From there you just enter the IPs and keys that your cloudflare account tells you to in the tunnel creation menu, and it all pretty much connects from there.
Then, on the cloudflare side, you make different subdomains point to local ports. So, for example, for connecting to qbittorrent web client, in the cloudflare menus I can make qbit.domain.example point to localhost:8080. In this case, it means “localhost” relative to the cloudflare access point you’ve made (which in my case can use localhost because its hosted on the same machine as my other docker containers, but if they are on different machines you can use local IP addresses).
I use their free plan, which is all you need if you’re just serving web content to a small number of users. You might need a domain to do this, but I don’t recall.
My layman’s understanding is you basically make cloudflare be the router, so their server/ports are what is exposed to the open internet rather than your local router.
Thank you. I run like a million Docker containers and haven’t ever gotten around to looking into this and you’ve just enlightened me perfectly. I appreciate it.
If you’re already running a million docker containers then just get a vps somewhere to host your blog. Cheapest reliable one I found last I looked was vultr. I think mine is $15 a year.
So lets be clear - there is no way to prevent others from crawling your website if they really want to (AI or non AI).
Sure you can put up a robots.txt or reject certain user agents (if you self host) to try and screen the most common crawlers. But as far as your hosting is concerned the crawler for AI is not too different from e.g. the crawler from google that takes piece of content to show on results. You can put a captcha or equivalent to screen non-humans, but this does not work that well and might also prevent search engines from finding your site (which i don’t know if you want?).
I don’t have a solution for the AI problem, as for the “greed” problem, I think most of us poor folks do one of the following:
- github pages (if you don’t like github then codeberg or one of the other software forges that host pages)
- self host your own http server if its not too much of an hassle
- (make backups, yes always backups)
Now for the AI problem, there are no good solutions, but there are funny ones:
- write stories that seem plausible but hold high jinx in there - if there ever was a good reason for being creative it is “I hope AI crawls my story and the night time news reports that the army is now using trained squirrels as paratroopers”
- double speak - if it works for fictional fascist states it works for AI too - replace all uses of word/expression with another, your readers might be slightly confused but such is life
- turn off your web site at certain times of the day, just show a message showing that it only works outside of US work hours or something
I should point out that none of this will make you famous or raise your SEO rank in search results.
PS: can you share your site, now i’m curious about the stories
I think you should clarify the problem first.
Privacy? You lose your privacy the moment you publish your blog anyway.
Is it visibility? You never expected Google to show your blog in most cases.
AI training? You could self-host and hope companies respect your robot.txt. But what’s the actual problem if you released your blog to the public in the first place? Anybody could’ve copy & pasted your blog also before this AI era.
Privacy? You lose your privacy the moment you publish your blog anyway.
Oh, right, I’m gonna just reinstall facebook on the phone because I’ve lost everything… Oh and we have lost all of privacy by commenting on the internet and stepping out of the house! All resistance is futile! We need to close this community before people waste more of their time!
This is not at all how it works. How would you lose privacy if you only publish what you want to publish? It’s entirely your decision what to include in your blog post.
Privacy?
Privacy is of course my major concern, hence posting to this community. But not tinfoil hat level.
visibility?
I’m happy to have my stuff indexed by Google, in fact, I want it to be.
AI training?
I’ll take that for 500!
Anybody could’ve copy & pasted your blog also before this AI era.
Plagiarism has been an issue since before Confucius was copied by Baffledus. But the cream still rose to the top. However in this AI era, everything is buried as its all just considered a part of the source data.
robot.txt.
Stories keep popping up about AI ignoring robots.
But… have we ever had privacy with blog articles? I mean the public ones.
I guess it comes down to what your definition of privacy is. I’m setting the bar low, I just don’t want to be used to train a large language model
If it’s about having your blog serve as AI training, it doesn’t really matter where you host it, it’s going to get scrapped and included in the data.
github pages site?
Github is microsoft.
People forget they use Microsoft Windows to write Microsoft .NET on Microsoft VsCode to then push to Microsoft Github and host it through Microsoft Azure
Libre software, WordPress, can’t bans us from removing malicous source code. Medium is service as a software substitute. If you don’t want AI reading your text, don’t share it.
