AI will probably force you to gate your content
On the scale of fan to skeptic to hater, when it comes to emerging AI tech like large language models and agentic coding, I’ve traditionally been very much in the middle — fascinated by the potential technical benefits, but often feeling it’s bubbly and over-emphasized.
(The metaphor I lean on should sound familiar to any vintage newspaper designer: Like Photoshop, it’s a useful tool that’s all too easy to abuse. Avoid the default filters.)
My optimism was cautious at best. I was rewarded for this cautious optimism by having my full archive seemingly pilfered for a Wikipedia knockoff.
This fall, I noticed that Elon Musk’s Grok had taken the archives of my newsletter Tedium — for better or worse, my life’s work — and converted it into hundreds of AI-generated entries on Grokipedia. Many of these entries didn’t cite Tedium posts once, but rather, upwards of 40 times, rephrasing concepts seemingly line by line. (Even worse, the site is set up in a way that essentially hides referrers in site analytics, but shows up in search results. I have no clue if it’s referring any traffic — but I know it’s basically competing with my site for each of my keywords.)
Much of the attention around Grokipedia has focused on its heavy reuse of Wikipedia or its political bias, not its aggressive reuse of content by publishers large and small.
It’s one thing for OpenAI and Claude to build something transformative but controversial from existing digital content (and, fittingly, face class-action lawsuits from authors). But Grokipedia seems to be working at a level beyond even aggregation — and, most daunting of all, it’s run by the world’s richest man. (If you dare, type your publication’s domain into this search and see if you’ve also been nailed by Grokipeda.)
Memetic metaphors aside — I didn’t expect the leopards to eat my face — I think it highlights the challenges that small or niche publishers face in this new environment. Old-school new media folks might prefer to avoid paywalling everything to within an inch of its life. (Some may even do crazy things like offer full-fat RSS feeds, heaven forbid.) But it’s becoming increasingly clear that if you don’t gate at least some of your content, you may be putting yourself at risk of just letting a tool like Grok or Perplexity eat your lunch.
(Even if you put a little something in your robots.txt telling them to stay away, odds are that if they’re committed enough, they might find a workaround, no matter what you do.)
As someone who fell in love with blogging because of the freedom it offered, this makes me sad, and I may still take steps to avoid the inevitability. But we increasingly live in an environment where bad actors extract value from journalists, artists, and other types of creatives, and do so with little care for retro concepts like copyright or fair use.
It hurts our readership; it hurts the relationship we have with our audiences. It discourages otherwise curious people from leaning into your archives. It has nothing to do with them. And honestly, it’s discouraging when you’re running a solo shop.
But I guess that disruption is coming for all of us, even the guy who writes about the history of salsa jars.
