Fierce Focus, Fearless Development

Making Sure YOU Own Your Blog

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As a privacy-conscious person who is also all for intellectual property rights, I want to say, first of all, that this blog is entirely human-generated. I may use AI to help me learn about new topics, but the words are all mine. I want to share with you how to make sure that AI will not train on your intellectual property–your blog. While I can’t guarantee anything, at least it can help reduce the chances and help you make a case about your ownership.

If you’re interested, you can consider the following strategies:

1. Use Robots.txt

  • What It Is: A robots.txt file is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and bots about which pages should not be indexed.
  • How to Implement: Create a robots.txt file in the root directory of your website. For example: User-agent: * Disallow: /
  • This tells all bots not to access any part of your site. You can also specify particular directories or pages.
  • You can learn more here. This, however, will not stop any malicious bots from webscraping your blog.

2. Add A Meta Tag

  • Use meta tags in your HTML to prevent indexing. For example, you can include <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> in the head section of your pages.
  • This and #1 can also reduce the likelihood of your site being indexed by Google and other search engines, so it’s not great for SEO.
  • Clearly state your copyright on your blog. This can deter unauthorized use of your content and reinforce your ownership. Mine is placed in the footer of the blog!

4. Terms of Service and/or Licensing

  • Create a clear terms of service agreement that outlines how your content can be used. Specify that your content cannot be used for training AI models without your explicit permission.
  • Using licenses (like Creative Commons) that specify how others can use your work. This can help protect your intellectual property; however, note that your copyright notices should align with your license.

5. Monitor Usage

  • You don’t have to use Google Analytics, despite how prevalent it is. Plausible (there’s a Hugo compatible library here) and Fathom Analytics are privacy-respecting tools to monitor where your content is being used online. Services like Google Alerts can notify you if your content appears elsewhere.

You can also contact AI companies themselves or take legal actions, but that is way beyond the scope of this. By implementing these strategies, you can better protect your blog content from being used in AI training and maintain ownership of your data.

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Web