Many websites have started running some sort of “human-verification” script before showing the content. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes (these seem to be much simpler than a captcha); I assume they’re just running some script that AI content scrapers don’t support, and if you don’t let the script run, they assume you’re a content scraper and don’t show you the content.
The problem is that I don’t let random scripts from third-party sites run on my machine.
This is primarily a security measure on my part. Secondarily, it also blocks most advertising. (I don’t really care about the ads themselves; I primarily object to the risk that random scripts will do something malicious on my machine. It’s still nice to avoid the ads.)
Yesterday there were three different pages that I tried to look at that didn’t load, because I wouldn’t let the “are you a human” scripts run.
That made me a little sad, but not sad enough to let random scripts run on my machine. Maybe I missed reading a really interesting post. But there are many, many interesting posts out there. I don’t have time to read even a tiny fraction of the things I’d find very interesting, so I’m generally unwilling to put much effort into getting to any particular post.
If that post is your post. . . . Either post it so I can see it, or just accept that it will go unread by me. I’ll be okay either way.
This is rather the opposite problem of the one my brother recently posted about: a talk we attended, where SFWA brought in several people to talk about the problem of detecting AI-written manuscripts.
Most of the people in the audience were writers, so of course there was roughly equal concern about false positives (falsely identifying actual human-written manuscripts as AI) as there was about false negatives (failing to identify an AI-written manuscript as AI). No one wants their work to get turned away because people assume it was written by a bot, and of course a single false accusation could ruin not only all hopes of a particular work seeing success, but ruin an entire career.
I’m not worried about AI killing us all, but I’m rather annoyed by people using AI to make my life worse in various ways, and by people who worry about AI making my life worse in these other ways.
