My AI-Driven Identity Crisis

Summary

I love coding. I love writing. I love writing about coding, as evidenced by the archives of this blog and the multiple tech books I have written. I’ve always prided myself on being able to explain things clearly. I have a unique ability to identify the order in which to teach concepts. I have enough five star reviews on my books to know that there are plenty of readers out there who agree with me. As a member, separately, of the programming and writing communities, I’ve seen plenty of excitement, agitation, skepticism, and consternation about the rapidly evolving AI revolution. For the most part, I’ve been on the excited side of the spectrum, though I also carry plenty of skepticism. It’s not clear whether AI will take our programming jobs or completely replace the author in writing e.g. fiction. But there is one successful usage of AI that is already proven: It is the go-to tool for obtaining information about technical topics. Stack Overflow usage is in absolute free-fall. Last year I published the book LazyVim for Ambitious Developers. I made it freely available on the web and many people have been kind enough to support me by donation or purchasing the ebook and hard cover editions. Of the thousands of page hits the site receives every month, only a fraction result in a sale, but that fraction is meaningful to me. Because the book is freely available, I feared it will be used in training the next generation of AI models, without my consent. So far, this hasn’t been the case as far as my queries to AI can tell, but they can already use a search engine to find my work and ingest it in a single conversation. I don’t want to put the book behind a paywall or even a captcha wall. I want people to know about it, and the only way they’ll know about it is if bots such as search engines and AI scrapers actually recommend it to them. Theft of intellectual property is a hotly debated topic in the AI discussions, but it’s not the point of this article. I am planning to write...