They were okay with it when Google was sending them traffic. Now they often don’t. They’ve broken the social contract of the web. So why should the sites whose work is being scraped be expected to continue upholding their end?

Not only are they scraping without sending traffic, they're doing so much more aggressively than Google ever did; Google, at least, respected robots.txt and kept to the same user-agent. They didn't want to index something that a server didn't want indexed. AI bots, on the other hand, want to index every possible thing regardless of what anyone else says.

> My Ithaca friends on Facebook complain incessantly about the very existence of AI to the extent that I would not want to say I ask Copilot how to use Windows Narrator or Junie where the CSS that makes this text bold or sometimes have Photoshop draw an extra row of bricks in a photograph for me.

Good! Why would you willingly confess any of that? I'd be humiliated if I did any of that.

I just wish the Chinese people who post 10,000+ AI generated pictures of girls with 5 belly buttons or 3 legs would feel humiliated -- I don't think they have some fetish for that, it's just their A.I. doesn't seem to know how to count.

I'm sorry you don't know about `font-weight: bold;` but that's no reason to pivot to xenophobia.

> Why was it OK for Google to incorporate their words into a for-profit search index which has increasingly sucked all the profit out of the system?

It wasn't okay, it's just that the reasons it wasn't okay didn't become apparent until later.

> The same people seem to have no problem with Facebook using their words for all things Facebook uses them for, however.

Many of those people will likely have a problem with it later, for reasons that are happening now but that they won't become fully aware of until later.

There's something more obviously nefarious and existential about AI. It takes the idea of "you are the product" to a whole new level.