Thoughts On The AI Scrapers Of Our Vocal Creations

Introduction

When Vocal was hit with the DOS (Denial Of Service) attack, resulting in loss of access to our work, they got the site back up and running and issued this statement. It really is worth taking the time to read and understand it.

So What Do I Think

The AI Scraping and stealing is worrying. It is used to fuel advertising back at us, add learning for AI writing tools and straight off plagiarism and theft, none of which Vocal consones and they have put tools in place to combat this.

Everything we publish, on any platform, can be a target for these thieves. Vocal gives us some security with the tools they have put in place. The situation reminds me of when my daughter, Juliet, published her first web page and then said:

"But Dad, somebody might see it",

I thought that was quite funny. We publish online because we want to be seen.

I have a blog, and as far as I know, there is nothing in place to stop people stealing from it, in fact I steal from it to share stories on Vocal, but it is all my own work, and no Vocal Creator has any reason to visit my blog (although this is how many visits it has had).

Vocal does have access to all our work, and they do use it to make the site work. The search facility is now very good, and I think it is getting better. I wrote about it here:

The fact that they have this should make it simple to spot plagiarism of Vocal Stories which at the moment is reaching epidemic proportions and has to be policed by Vocal Creators. Here are a few pieces that have been written on this:

These are stories that came up when I put "plagiarism of Vocal stories" into the Vocal Search, and I hope that one day we won't have to write stories like that.

AI is blamed but it's not AI it is the people doing this. As I say about AI, it is artificial but it's not intelligent. If a person throws a brick through your window, it's not the brick's fault, it is the person throwing the brick.

Conclusion

I think that Vocal are doing a good job for us, the platform still has many faults, and I will continue to berate them for not fixing certain things, but these are minor issues.

They are dealing with the major issues and the platform has little downtime, which is why it becomes so disturbing when it does go down.

Thank you so much for reading and I would love to hear your thoughts.

I included Queen's "We Will Rock You" because it seems sort of appropriate in a few ways