Speaking of Theft (II)
AI bots and what to do about it
Happy belated Juneteenth. Freedom means curiosity, receipts, and unlearning the easy headlines.
THE BIG TAKE
Cloudflare’s CEO said the quiet part loud at Cannes: Google’s bots crawl your site 18 times for every visit they send you. OpenAI: 1,500 crawls per click. Anthropic: 60,000 to 1. They’ll devour every word you bleed onto the page and toss you nothing back but the existential threat of replacement.
Translation: we’re feeding a machine that has no plan to feed us back. This is Viacom vs. YouTube all over again except now the clips are your whole career. You can’t sue the future. You have to outmaneuver it.
And if you’re Black, Brown, marginalized, or come from a story tradition that mainstream media never deserved in the first place, you especially can’t afford to let bots flatten you into just another generic prompt. Because guess what they’re training on first? Us.
So here’s the counterplay, before we get steamrolled twice by the same old system in new code:
Starve the bots, feed your people.
Publish decoys. Teasers. Beautiful scraps. Keep the full steak inside your newsletter, your live events, your Discord. Make the open web your marketing — not your archive.Be too human to scrape clean.
Legal watermarks are nice, but cultural watermarks are stronger: references, context, inside jokes, voices, dialect, local flavor. The more human, situated, and non-generic your work is, the worse bots are at mimicking it convincingly. Think ‘story told by me in a way that can’t be scraped flat.’ Community-based reporting, on-the-ground sources, ephemeral drops.Flip the power: license your archive.
Instead of playing whack-a-mole lawsuits, negotiate collective deals. Think Associated Press but for creators: “Sure, train on my archive — but I get paid per token, per month, plus data on usage.” Small publishers can band together, bundle archives, set floors for usage fees. No single freelancer can fight OpenAI —but a coalition can (hi there, have we met?).Build value bots can’t fake.
When people feel seen by your work, they don’t replace you with a bot. Bots can plagiarize your style, but they can’t show up at the city council or DM a source.Play Viacom’s endgame: partner smarter.
Remember: suing YouTube didn’t work, but later they partnered with it, monetized clips, built channels. So: don’t just scream ‘don’t train on us’ — negotiate distribution inside AI ecosystems, so when ChatGPT answers ‘what’s happening in DC today?’ — it feeds your branded excerpt with a link and you get a cut. If the big models won’t pay, push local ones that do. Or build your own micro model with your audience.
Stop seeing AI as only a vampire. Treat it as a chaotic new distribution channel you can partly tame. AI is not our salvation but neither is it our apocalypse. It’s just another channel. Out-human it. Organize. Get your money. Otherwise, the same system that ghosted your stories in the old newsroom will ghost them again, only this time, perfectly polite and fluent in your voice. Out-human the bots, monetize the rights, get organized with other underdog publishers.
I know what side I’m on.
Stay scrappy.
Speaking of which…
ROOMS WORTH ENTERING
A shortlist for the bold, the curious, and the sick of stale takes.
🖤 The Danger of Black Girl AI Images
Too real to be real — and that’s the problem. Check who’s profiting off our faces.
🎤 Pitch or Perish: SXSW Panel Picker Opens June 24
Stop grumbling about weak panels and stack the roster yourself. Pitch your weird, necessary genius. Do it.
👧🏾 Before Ruby Bridges, They Walked In First
The girls who desegregated New Orleans before Ruby Bridges did it alone, and we rarely say their names. Fix that now.
Read on Capital B
💌 The Taliban Letters
One of the most stunning cross-border conversations you’ll read all year — a bestselling author’s emails with an Afghan woman, animated to devastating effect.
Watch it unfold
⏳ TikTok: 90 Days Left on the Clock
Same panic, same playbook. 90 days for TikTok to untangle its ownership— yeah right.
📱 Social Media Finally Eats TV’s Lunch
It happened: more Americans get news from the algorithm than the anchor desk. Keep saying TV is dead — it’s news that’s next.
Nieman Lab breakdown
🗂️ Big Tech Wants States Off Their AI Turf
They want Washington to set AI rules, so local states can’t. Ask yourself who wins when the feds get to write the leash. Hmmmmmm….
Read on FT
SOMETHING FOR THE BUILDERS
Hey creators, journalists, podcasters — if you want to keep doing what you do without selling your soul to an algorithm that doesn’t know your name, I’m building a studio for you. First cohort: 5–10 people, no webinars, no cash grabs. Just tools, guardrails, and community that works as hard as you do.
📩 Hit me at rn@pressone.studio or reply here for the guide.
ONE LAST THING
If you read this far — you’re my people. Forward it to yours. We need you. And we need each other more than we need the bots.