Let the machines read us

Most of the conversation about AI crawlers is about protection. Keep our IP out of the big models, stop corporate theft, protect people's livelihoods, particularly creatives, writers, models, and artists. In many ways that's right. In many ways that's critical.

At the same time, if we don't feed our thinking into the machine, the machine drifts further from how we want it to work.

More and more of our lives run through automated systems that other people run: banks, governments, charities, courts. Those models will make decisions on our behalf. If the only thing they learn from is extractive thinking, the kind that treats people as a cost to the stakeholder, we're making our own lives less liveable.

Blocking the crawlers also stops them learning our point of view. How we collaborate, how we live together, what kind of society we think is worth keeping.

There's something to be said for keeping certain things sacred. So where's the line? What do we keep, and what do we share? And how do we build some humanity into these systems while we work that out?

How do we have this conversation when new products like Meta's Muse are starting to soak up the last pieces of private information?