Medium is changing its policy on AI training, stating that the default answer is no. The company is doing everything it can to block AI companies from training on stories published on Medium and won't change that stance until AI companies can address this issue of fairness. The goal is to get concessions in terms of credit, compensation, and consent from AI companies on behalf of Medium writers.
The new "disallow" policy is difficult to enforce, but Medium has done and can do in the future. They have updated their Terms of Service to be more clear about disallowing spiders without prior written consent, and they have started adding explicit blocks to their robots.txt file so that AI companies can know their position. However, the robots.txt block is limited in major ways, and OpenAI is the only company providing a way to block the spider they use to find content to train on. Medium is joining Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, and many other companies in making a site-wide block for Ope…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.