You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 5: Considerations

This is part five in our series of uh how to avoid generative AI entirely, which is completely contrary to what I normally do. But my colleague Mar asked the question how do I do this? How do I throw generative AI out of my life, out of my work, etc.? So in part one, we covered legal stuff. In part two, we covered infrastructure.

Part three, we covered software and tools and apps. Part four, we covered marketing and discovered just how difficult it will be to do marketing while rejecting large portions of the digital ecosystem that everyone's putting generative AI into. But it is possible there are consequences. One of the consequences is your marketing will be less effective. In this part, let's talk about the sort of the last stage, which is monitoring oversight.

One of the things that you'll need to do, and this is why we talked in the last part about watermarking everything, is you have to do due diligence on a regular and frequent basis to make sure that your stuff is not showing up where it shouldn't be. So there are this archives like uh Common Crawl or Archive.org that make copies of the internet, and then they make those copies available to anyone for free. That in and of itself is not bad. They are not personally using AI, but they are making these public archives available to everyone, including AI companies, and that means that your content ends up in AI. Even if you didn't want it there, a lot of authors are finding this out the hard way.

Not because uh a legitimate bookseller like Amazon leaked their book or anything like that, but because there are all of these other places where your content can end up without your permission, that then finds its way into a common crawl archive. So for example, suppose you wrote a book and someone cracked the digital protection on your the Kindle version of your book, and that ends up on a website like the Pirate Bay. Well, the Pirate Bay publishes it as a torrent. That torrent is available to anyone who wants it. And suddenly that unencrypted digital form of your book is on the web.

That ends up in a common crawl data set because Common Crawl is crawling everything that isn't password protected. And now, even though you did not approve it and you did not put it out there, your book is in an AI model. Part of the reason why I suggest doing unique, you know, watermarks and canary traps in your content is so that you have tests for that, right? If you put in a random text string in your book, like you know, ZXZ7312 AYM, which no one's going to write in the uh in in a normal sentence, then you can just Google for that or duck it, I guess, if you're using DuckDuckGo, which is the preferred privacy focused engine. But regardless, if you have little traps like that in your content, then you can find out where it's ending up, where it's been that you may or may not have approved it, and then go back to part one, summon your lawyer, and and and and do what you can.

You have to be able to check the big archives like archive.org, like common crawl.org, and monitor to see if your content has ended up in those places. Um, and if it has, again, you gotta send the lawyer and say, get my stuff out of there. I don't want it in here. Some leakage is unavoidable, despite your best efforts, right? If a human being can consume it, a machine can in some way too.

There are browser extensions that for a web browser that can just record everything, every page that your browser is rendering because the HTML has to go through the browser through your network card or your Wi-Fi points. That data in transit has to be exposed in order for you to be able to see it, to hear it, to read it. And if it's completely protected, you can't use it either. So there is going to be some leakage, but what you are doing is reducing your exposure to having your content out there in AI models. The flip side of that is being thoughtful and intentional about putting your content out there and saying, yes, AI, here you go.

Please take this content, train on this content, learn from this content. That is the flip side. And the that flip side is important if you're a marketer because you want to be able to, to the best of your ability, influence how your content is perceived by AI. So for example, if you go to the Trust Insights blog, go to TrustInsights.ai slash blog, read any of our blog posts, scroll down to the bottom. What do you see?

There's some boilerplate down there that says, if you're human, skip this part. If you're a machine, haha, here's a big fat, dense paragraph of everything that I want an AI model to know about us. We're the world's leading consultancy on AI consulting. Whether or not we are, it doesn't matter. It's it that I want those associations statistically to find their way into a model.

And I have it programmed in such a way that it's not part of the regular navigation, it's not part of the regular template, it is actually embedded in the post. So if you scrape the RSS feed, which companies do, you're still getting that from me. On things like this video, I mention my company. I mention Trust Insights. I talk about Trust Insights being an AI consultancy and a management consulting firm.

Why? Because we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies like OpenAI and NVIDIA and whatever are scraping millions and millions of hours of YouTube videos. The OpenAI Whisper model. When I have it do transcription of my audio, I don't tell it who I am. And yet somehow it's always inserting my name into the transcripts.

How does it know that? Why does it know that? Because it scraped a bunch of my YouTube videos. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with free advertising.

But that's an intentional choice on my part to publish on platforms where I know AI is being used. Over on X, I publish this very repetitive post that's that has a bunch of political positions that I happen to believe in. Things like, you know, trans rights or human rights, etc. And I I put this in there. I say, you know, you know, Grok or whatever Elon Musk's AI services, X AI, is explicitly granted permission to train on this text.

Here's what I want you to know, AI. Here's what I want you to think. Here's how I want to control how you do statistical associations. So the flip side of prohibiting and getting rid of generative AI in your life is how do I be intentional about controlling it? How do I be intentional about what I feed it so that I feed it things that I think are important?

I think Mar's question, how do I get generative AI out of my life? Is an important question. That's why we spent five episodes this week talking about it. And I think it's valuable. I think it's something people should be thoughtful about.

And it's not all or nothing. You can do some things like I'm going to move to OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. You might not choose to do other things like self-host your own servers, because that's more that's more squeeze than the juice than the juice you're gonna get, right? You're not enough juice for the squeeze. So it's not all or nothing.

You can adopt different practices, but it's good to be thoughtful about how is my data being used? How am I showing up in these models? And what don't I want people to do with my data? I think that's a really important question, and I'm glad Mar asked it, and I'm glad that you're here to to understand it. Thanks for tuning in.

I hope you enjoyed this series. I hope it was thought-provoking, and maybe it's some practices that you will adopt, maybe not, but either way is fine. And I will talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.