I think this is going to happen relatively soon, but people seem to think it is an absurd proposition when to me it is the clearly an inevitable step copyright holders and tech companies attempting to protect their AI moat will do…
What do you think?
Websites have tried to prevent that for a long time now, mostly unsuccessfully. I actually think it’s even less feasible now than it used to be, as even if you were to prevent direct copy-paste, running OCR algorithms to convert any image to a text is a trivial task nowadays.
I guess I want to emphasize I obviously don’t think this is feasible to technically fully do, but I do think it is accomplishable to effectively deny it to most non-technical users.
Great question. Accessibility compliance (eg, text-to-voice screen reader compatibility) is probably the main reason why we’re not there already
I think you are totally right, I hadn’t thought about that.
Many have tried. Same shit with preventing right-clicking to save images. It never fucking works, because you can’t give someone a scant quantity of data, and then also keep it from them.
How would that “protect their AI moat”?
It won’t really but I am unconvinced that matters because it will be a simple direct step for companies to take superficially and it will be used as an excuse to force people to go to ad infested websites and use sharing tools more directly under the control of massive corporations when they do want to quote an article.
This is similar to how security theater in passenger aviation travel has grown and grown with no connection to rationality or reality.
It already exists in the wild and has been like that since like early 2000s (or even before that as well, but I don’t know). There are plugins that bypasses those. Ultimately, you’re trying to control what should be readable to the computer, which has not worked well for anyone determined enough. Besides, blocking the ability to right click/select would not work against AI training at all, even without those bypasses.
