Since the Fullyst blog is still hosted on Medium, I recently received their newsletter with a short summary of a new post from their own blog: https://blog.medium.com/default-no-to-ai-training-on-your-stories-abb5b4589c8

That post is about AI and its development, but not from the angle I expected.

What is wrong with this post and why am I writing about it at all?

Here are a few key points from the text and my comments on each one:

'Companies working in artificial intelligence are almost universally violating fundamental rules of fairness. They make money off your stories without asking your permission and without offering you any compensation.'

AI companies are not violating rules of fairness, nor are they breaking any laws. Information, including articles on Medium, is published in the public space, which means that everyone in that space should have access to it, both people and technologies used to train AI. At the same time, outright theft of texts and republishing them on other platforms is not acceptable.

'...your stories are contributing to the development of popular new technologies, but you have not received any compensation or credit.'

What compensation and recognition did the creators of the technologies that Medium itself relies on receive? I suspect that Medium only compensates those companies that provide paid support for their products (and the payment is for support, not the product itself), while everyone else gets no compensation and no recognition.

After that, Medium’s CEO offers two questions:

1. Would you agree to allow your stories to be used if you received a 10% increase in your Medium earnings?

2. Would you let search engines train their AI on your stories if refusing meant your traffic would be cut in half?

Both questions look like direct manipulation. After reading a text that paints AI companies in the most negative light, these questions push you to give in and grant them the right to use your texts, because otherwise you are supposedly going to lose out.

Medium, like any commercial company, is trying to squeeze profit out of modern technologies while at the same time getting in the way of their development.

As for the Fullyst blog, it will soon move to a standalone platform, and its content will be free to use for AI development without restriction.