Early this year, Crankenstein said it had been two years since I last updated this site; it had actually only been six weeks. But now we’re coming up on nine months, and here I am, still with nothing to say — mostly because of bots and scrapers and ruthless tech oligarchs and the politicians who do their bidding.
In almost 30 years of writing online for various websites, I’ve never seen anything like this current A.I. folly. Nothing anyone’s ever written is safe; hosting platforms and security apps can blacklist a dozen A.I. domains one day, and two or three days later, they’re sneaking through another door, digital burglars stealing all the so-called “content” they can find and returning again and again to make sure there’s nothing new to plunder.
As silly as some of my work is, it’s always been original: I only write about films I’ve watched and books I’ve read, and my writing is always 100% mine.1 Even the screenshots that accompany my movie reviews are ones I personally took, a small matter of personal morality but one that’s indicative of how seriously I regard these efforts. It takes hours to write a six-paragraph trifle about a long-forgotten Afterschool Special, and about 30 seconds for a bot to steal a hundred of them.
This ridiculous A.I. feeding frenzy isn’t one I ever signed up for, and I consider it a clear-cut criminal enterprise. Part of me wants to make like Ellen Brody in Jaws: The Revenge and launch a deranged crusade against it, but for now the easier move has been to stop throwing the bots more red meat.