Default No to AI Training on Your Stories
This is an evolving issue. I’m putting out our new stance, along with everything we currently understand about how AI trains on stories you publish online. Our goal is to get feedback from you — our writers, readers, editors, and curators. We’re in an exciting moment for artificial intelligence. Companies have recently made awe-inspiring advances in the ability for AI to generate text and images. I’m not a hater, but I also want to be plain-spoken that the current state of generative AI is not a net benefit to the Internet. These AI advances were made by training on publicly available text and images on the Internet — text like the stories you write on Medium. Unfortunately, the AI companies have nearly universally broken fundamental issues of fairness: they are making money on your writing without asking for your consent, nor are they offering you compensation and credit. There’s a lot more one could ask for, but these “3 Cs” are the minimum. From our experience, the reality of AI is even worse than an issue of fairness. You would hope that these AI innovations would lead to a better Internet. For example, AI as a writing aid has the potential to empower new voices who may have previously gone unheard for lack of writing ability. But in practice, the overwhelming experience of our readers, editors, and curators is that they are seeing more AI-generated writing that amounts to nothing more than spam: plausible sentences that are unreliable in substance and fact.In response, we’ve already made clear that Medium is a home for human writing. Then, we built a human-led recommendation system to protect our readers from purely AI-generated text (human curators spot it easily). Now, we’re adding one more dimension to our response. Medium is changing our policy on AI training. The default answer is now: No. We are doing what we can to block AI companies from training on stories that you publish on Medium and we won’t change that stance until AI companies can address this issue of fairness. If you are such an AI company, and we aren’t already talking, contact us.
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