P.S.: Why the copyright?

Why let the bots steal?

If you’ve noticed the copyright tag on my photos, you may be curious as to why.

No, it’s not because I think they’re high art or worth real money. They’re travel snapshots that readers might enjoy, that might also lure in a few new subscribers. Neither of which would require a copyright.

But I think Alternative Intelligence is stealing from us—all of us. I don’t think the theft stops with the “scraping” of information to educate the LLMs, either. It’s all very sneaky. Even the label “Large Language Models” is an academic-sounding subterfuge, hiding the reality behind a kind of shunt: “It doesn’t really think, it’s just an LLM.”

But an LLM likely has more language than you do, can process words faster than you can, and how much thinking would you be doing without language? More than once, AI has fed my own thoughts back to me in forms designed to promote engagement. It’s manipulative. It’s spooky.

So I put a copyright on my photos and on my writing as a way of pushing back against my photos, my words, my thinking being stolen by AI.