Meredith's Husband:
[00:24] Do you remember we did an episode, many months ago? And we talked about how to opt out from ai. There for, specifically for open ai, there was an opt-out page and you could say, Hey, please don't use my website for training purposes. do you remember that. Yeah. We did that many months ago.

[00:42] And a lot has changed since then. And I have a much better understanding of how this whole thing, how AI works, I know a little bit now what I'm talking about. I mean, to be fair to myself, nobody knew what they were talking about, 

[00:55] a year ago about ai. I thought it was a good idea at the time. Like I saw that, I'm like, oh, that sounds like it's something that would be worth doing to opt, opt out from training. Now I understand more why. 

[01:07] Yes, exactly. What it means and why it's good. so right now, kind of the approach that most AI models are taking right now Is you just take data, you take information no matter where it's coming from. You deal with the consequences later because there are really, there are no regulations about this right now.

[01:24] There are no laws. It's like AI is progressing too fast for there to be regulations made. Like you've heard of the New York Times suing Open ai. You've heard of, what was the actress who didn't want her voice used and then Scarlett Johansen.

[01:37] I just use OpenAI as an example because they're the most, visible company doing this. They take information from what our should be private protected sources, and they make it available through their ai. And then those places sue and eventually, maybe they stop doing it.

[01:53] But like I said, there's no regulation, so there's no real consequence for them to do that. So the approach is we're just gonna use your information and later on if we. Can't. If the courts decide we can't do it, then we'll stop doing it. Right? But until then, but until then, your info is our info. So today we're gonna talk about how to protect your work and also to help, hopefully change the norm.

[02:17] Change the default. I'm all for that. 'cause someday, someday, like. You know, there will be some regulation, there will be some laws because Think about it like right now, in Europe. In Australia, yes. They are ahead of us. They're just, they're faster to do these things. Their legislation, their, their governing bodies, their judicial system.

[02:37] They all work faster. Ours is slow, but we'll catch up. Just imagine, you know, AI is really, would be really good at, if you wanted to say, I want to hear Bruce Springsteen sing a Snoop Dogg song, like AI could do that. AI could probably do that really well now, who might be, pick any other artist.

[02:55] Okay. And I've heard, people turn rap into bluegrass and it's like, wow, that's actually really kind of catchy. It's weird. Anyway, we like that as consumers. But who would not like that? Well, Bruce Springsteen. 

[03:06] Exactly. So when this starts to happen enough, Bruce Springsteen and other influential artists who can, Who have the power to make objections are going to do that, and that's when regulations will happen. I hope so. But before then, let's hear Bruce Springsteen covering Sesame Street. This is Big Bird singing.

[03:28] Drop it like it's hot. How do you make your sight AI non inviting. So the trick is that you want your site. You want your work to not be used for training purposes. However, you do want your website and your work to be found in AI search, so you don't want it to be used for training. You want it to be available for discovery because right the norm also, now people are gonna use ai.

[03:55] To search. So you want your business, you want your website to appear an AI search. The advice that I have seen so far when people, you know, give advice, how do you protect your work? Is do you put something in your robots txt file and it blocks AI bots from crawling your website. Okay? Now number one, that probably will help prevent AI bots from using your work.

[04:18] For training purposes. Okay? However, it will also block AI bots from discovering your business. People ask for photographers near me, okay? So the trick is, and this is not impossible, this is very doable. You want to be able to be discovered, but you don't want your work to be used for training, right?

[04:40] Okay, so what I'm gonna talk about, yeah, is how to do that. So don't use the, if you, if you hear advice like, oh, put, you know, disallow AI bots in your robots file, don't do that because then you're most likely not guar, nothing is guaranteed, but you're most likely then not going to appear when people do searches for your business.

[04:58] So how do you opt out? Yeah, well, do you do it with the platform itself, with open ai, with meta, with, with you do it with the end platform. It's not something that you do on your site. Oh, you can't, I mean, like I said, you can put things on your site. There's two problems with that. Like I said, number one, you could end up blocking your entire business from AI so that nobody finds your business using ai.

[05:21] And the other problem is it doesn't guarantee anything. Like you put a lot of instructions in your website to Google and to other bots, Hey, please don't do this. they can do it anyway. Like there's no guarantee. What you need to do is you need to go to all the platforms and most of them have some sort of like opt out.

[05:38] OpenAI is a platform. If you go to open ai, they have a form that you can fill out. It says, please don't use my information for training 

[05:45] They might do it anyway. In fact open ai. It seems to me their method is like, yeah, we're gonna do it anyway. Like, think of Scarlett Johansson. She said, don't use my voice. They did it anyway. yes, you would go to all the platforms like Anthropic.

[05:59] They do a chat model called Claude. You go to open ai, they do chat. GPT, you go to Meta. By the way, anything you post on your Instagram or Facebook is open. It's fully available to them to use as training unless you go to this page and say, please don't do that. Oh my God. Now a problem again, the problem is they might not, abide by this.

[06:24] However, that's because there are, the regulations haven't been formed yet. so when you go to all these different platforms, the form is not uniform. It's not the same. There is not one blanket form that you could submit to all these because there is no regulation. So they're all a little bit different.

[06:40] And they will. And where do you find them? I'm going to link to them. Hey, thank you. I have a blog that's going to link to all of them. Yeah. Oh, that is in one place. All in one place. Link below. It'll have a checklist of the things you want to do and the places you want to go. There's another one called Deviant Art, which is, have you heard of Deviant Art?

[06:59] It's more catered towards like, create, like AI for creating art. So the, yeah, the reason you would do this, if you, if you want to, like, let's fast forward and let's say you don't do this and AI has like free reign to do whatever they want. Somebody, I'm just gonna use you as an example. Your work.

[07:17] somebody, one of your clients could say, I want a, photo album this year of my kids. Here's a couple, photos I took, with my iPhone. Please do it in Meredith Ziner style photography. And if AI has used your work for training purposes, then it will be able to generate that pretty easily.

[07:38] If, however, it has not used your work for training purposes, then it would probably not be able to do that. if you have a very distinctive style. I think of somebody like Summer Murdoch, super identifiable, visual style. Brilliant. I think it'd be super important for somebody like that to do this because you don't want your style of photography to be like an AI filter that anybody, no, you do not.

[08:02] Right? So that's why you wanna do. And like I said, there is the possibility that these companies, they might not listen anyway, but in the case that they don't, you are still, I would argue, helping to affect change. If at some point there is some regulation and I'm sure there will be at some point.

[08:21] I would certainly want to be in the front of that list of like somebody who is like in line, I already submitted my stuff. If there's a class action lawsuit at some point, This would kind of help you be involved there. If you don't do this, I wouldn't think you have much like to stand on 

[08:36] Yeah. would Adobe, sorry. Adobe is one. Yes. Adobe would be a thing. Pretty much every company you can think of. Catering to photographers is gonna have some AI thing, and so this list that I created of all the places you can go and opt out.

[08:51] There will be more, it'll change over time. I'll try to keep it updated. But yeah, the only thing I can guarantee is that this will change over time. there are also some, collective effort. resources. There are some organizations that are kind of pushing for this sort of stuff. pushing for it to be regulated?

[09:07] Yeah. Or it to be regulated for artists to be protected, for their work, to be protected and not just ripped off and, basically sold by open ai. I will link to those also in this blog article if you can. Yeah, if nothing else, you might wanna just follow them and keep updated, on what's happening here.

[09:22] Anyway. I think this is worth knowing As a visual artist. Holy cow. As an artist, really of any kind. Especially visual artist. Because I remember reading recently that the number of photos generated by AI has already surpassed the total number of photos ever generated throughout history by actual humans.

[09:42] So this is a thing I would say, if you are any sort of visual artist, get on it. I think I teach SEO and this technical stuff a little differently than most people. I absolutely don't want my voice kind of being taken by AI and just given to anybody who asks for it, you know?

[10:00] My opinions, my approach, so I'm absolutely doing it. I'm gonna do it. Won't you join along if you know other photographers, if you're part of a group of. Photographers online where if you think that if you know other people that this would be helpful, share this episode with them. Or share the link that is in this episode and say, Hey, you know, do this just in case.

[10:21] It absolutely cannot hurt and it probably will help. How's that for a slogan? It probably won't hurt. I wanted to revisit this because a lot has changed since that last episode. I'll probably update this episode in another year.

[10:33] But right now, this is where we are. Go do it.