Previously, I wrote about the prevalence of artificial intelligence (A.I. or the more common AI) and whether we should be worried. Months later, I came across a very real reason bloggers are getting worried about AI. Google appears to have taken a post of mine and used it to train its Gemini model an inject the results in to its search. This means no one needs to click on my site for the content. If I were earning ad revenue (this site moved away from that a long time ago).
Let’s start from the beginning. Through the decades of writing 750 or more blog posts on this site, I have written a ton of how-tos or instructional posts. One of them explained how to dynamically disable shared folders in VMware Workstation. The bizarre thing was that I’d forgotten how to do this thing I wrote about, but knew it was possible. So, I took to Google (as one does) to find the answer. Here’s what Google returned:
At the top of the results, even before the sponsored posts, there was an AI summary that answered my question inline. You’ll notice several indicators that Google got this information from different places, and this site was one of them. Certainly, anyone could click anywhere CWL is visible in the result and get here for the full details, but if you’ve already gotten your answer, there’s no need.
Over the years I’ve moved away from any sort of analytics, but recently it’s made sense to just throw Google’s tracking code in to have a basic level of measurement (sorry folks). Over time I’ll see how this site’s audience is changed, more as a curiosity.
But the big question is: Should we be doing something to stop this? Additionally, is there even a solution (such as changing this site’s robots.txt)? May the best way to deal with how my content is used is to relax, let the AI models index everything. Just lean into it.
For now, there are no restrictions on what AI bots/crawlers can index here. Some may respect if an opt-out mechanism is used, others may not. What say you reader? More than anything, thanks for reading over the years. I really do appreciate it.