Here’s a fact: “Opt-in” is great for programs a platform controls, but meaningless when that platform has no control.
Take, for example, oh, I don’t know, let’s say AI companies scraping web content without your permission. The heart wants to make content scraping permissions “opt-in,” so people who post content online are protected by default.
Except we won’t be. Smaller, “good” AI companies may comply with “opt-out” notices; big ones surely won’t. Scrapers gonna scrape.
So why even bother with an “opt-out” setting? Because companies that continue to scrape opted-out content may find themselves on the losing end of major lawsuits.
Of course there’s no telling how these lawsuits will work out—not with ketamine supervillains and their GOP enablers willfully violating consumer, worker, and climate protection laws here in the benighted States of America. But even so, an opt-out notice is a red line, and most corporate legal teams are cautious and sober—at least during working hours.
An opt-out notice is *something.* It smells funky, but has a chance of working.
Of course opt-in feels better. It’s how we’d do things if we had control over third-party scrapers. But we don’t have that control.
Which makes opt-in for AI scraping a feel-good but basically performative gesture. And we don’t have time for those.
However pretty it might be to think otherwise, something imperfect that might work beats something pure that won’t. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful. I’m only here to tell you what we both know in our souls.
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Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash.