Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) development by big
corporations the death-knell for copyright law and intellectual rights? If
international legislators do not grasp this nettle soon, I fear we may have
already lost the battle to keep ownership of anything we create.
On our website we have a useful and interesting application
called ‘Flagcounter’ that shows the location of our visitors from the top
twenty countries, by displaying their national flags in the right lower margin
of our home page. But over the last few years, a worrying trend has developed.
The UK and USA have naturally been the top nations from
which our visitors originated, with around 6% of our total visitors coming from
these two English-speaking countries. In contrast, in less than two years, Singapore
has sped up the visitor list and now accounts for 90% of our visitors! I doubt Singapore
has that many cinderella local post devotees.
After a little
delving it appears the Singapore statistics represent internet robots, spiders,
or crawlers, designed to “borrow” images for AI resources. In other words,
stealing without credit to the image owner or creator.
Image Source: Pixabay
It seems Google Analytics (GA) filters out these visitors
from Singapore, as they do not appear in website GA results. Of course, AI
crawlers are not only restricted to Singapore, they are being used by all the
major (and minor) AI developers targeting the world wide web.
The worst thing is they cannot be stopped from visiting my website
even when they are specifically blocked in the site .htaccess file. Other website
owners have reported similar futile attempts to protect their sites from these AI
thieves. If I had not been using the application ‘Flagcounter’ I would not have
noticed this digital burglary at all!
In order to counter this free unattributed use of CILP stamp
images by AI bots, CILP is proposing to deface future stamp images with diagonal
red lines, as is the custom of stamp issuing authorities worldwide.
Am I bolting
the door after the horse has bolted? Maybe, but a little victory makes me feel
better!
Postmaster
