Artificial Intelligences like Chat-GPT & Bard work by happily feeding on the entire Internet. Many of the sites derive some (if not all) of their funding from advertising revenue. Unfortunately, once the info has been ingested by the AI, it can be returned an infinite number of times without offering compensation to the original sites, wich won't get any visit anymore.
This also raises a question of intellectual property. Currently, any creation you post on the internet can be freely used to feed an AI, without even giving you the opportunity to give or refuse your consent.
This is why I come to ask myself the following questions:
Shouldn't we put in place a system to indicate that we refuse or authorize indexing by AIs? And if so, what form should it take? Should this take the form of a tag on the site, like the NoIndex currently? or a license file? or something else ?
I look forward to reading your response
Top comments (4)
Really great topic!
I can tell you that we adapted our plagiarism guidelines on DEV to include a note on Ai-assisted plagiarism because like you've noted these AI-driven tools are pulling info from existing sources and it's not fair to not give these original sources credit.
I would love to see an AI-noindex tag for this very reason! I do think SEO should at least try to prioritize human generated content over AI-generated content. If the AI-generated content is particularly good in some way, then perhaps the SEO bots should have other ways of detecting that and then index that content if it fits certain criteria or reaches a certain threshold, BUT I think that should be the exception to the rule and the rule should slant toward deindexing AI generated content.
Anywho, that's my take.
Your point is really interesting and I didn't at that in a first sight. I think the main problem on prioritize Human-generated content in SEO is to detect it. Unless the content creator declares it himself, it is difficult to detect the intervention of an AI in the creative process. And as it develops it will be more and more difficult.
The point I wanted to discuss was a little different (sorry English isn't my native langague so i might be not clear). I meaned a meta tag which makes it possible to prohibit AIs from drawing inspiration from its content.
Oh you're all good! Now I totally understand ya... an HTML tag that would prohibit AI tools (like ChatGPT) from taking your work, that's a fantastic idea!
Exactly 👌