Jeffrey Zeldman

Here’s a fact: “Opt-in” is great for programs a platform controls, but meaningless when that platform has no control.

Take, for example, oh, I don’t know, let’s say AI companies scraping web content without your permission. The heart wants to make content scraping permissions “opt-in,” so people who post content online are protected by default.

Except we won’t be. Smaller, “good” AI companies may comply with “opt-out” notices; big ones surely won’t. Scrapers gonna scrape.

So why even bother with an “opt-out” setting? Because companies that continue to scrape opted-out content may find themselves on the losing end of major lawsuits.

Of course there’s no telling how these lawsuits will work out—not with ketamine supervillains and their GOP enablers willfully violating consumer, worker, and climate protection laws here in the benighted States of America. But even so, an opt-out notice is a red line, and most corporate legal teams are cautious and sober—at least during working hours.

An opt-out notice is *something.* It smells funky, but has a chance of working.

Of course opt-in feels better. It’s how we’d do things if we had control over third-party scrapers. But we don’t have that control.

Which makes opt-in for AI scraping a feel-good but basically performative gesture. And we don’t have time for those.

However pretty it might be to think otherwise, something imperfect that might work beats something pure that won’t. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful. I’m only here to tell you what we both know in our souls.

Your AI sponsor,

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Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash.

The post Your opt-innie wants to talk to your opt-outtie. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

A whinnying horse. A blaxploitation sample. A female instructor saying Chinese is the easiest language to learn. These three brief audio samples regularly interrupt my late-night headphone music listening.

I’m not tripping or having a medical episode. My bedroom faces the rear of the Chinese Mission to the UN. I can’t be certain that these unwelcome late-night audio interruptions come from there, but it’s a theory. If you’ve never fallen gently asleep to a bespoke playlist of jazz ballads, only to sit bolt upright in terror an hour later because a horse is shrilly whinnying in your ears, you should try it some time.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

The post My Glamorous Life: The Unexpected Samples appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Two Jews are standing in an open cattle car en route to Auschwitz. The train pauses on a bridge overlooking a river. Directly below them is a transport ship.

“Look!” the first Jew excitedly tells his friend. “Now’s our chance! That ship down there is delivering war supplies to the port city of Kaiserberg. If we jump down to the deck now and hide in one of those tanks, maybe we can avoid Auschwitz and ride things out in Kaiserberg!”

The second Jew thinks a moment.

“What if Kaiserberg’s worse?” he asks.

I don’t like to explain jokes, but if this one offends you, consider that I’m Jewish myself. The joke came to me fully formed while I was chatting with a friend about something unrelated. It felt like a perfect distillation of Jewish pessimism. Not that Judaism as a religion is pessimistic, but after two thousand years of, you know, we can be a bit touchy. I’m sorry if this disclaimer ruined the joke for you. I did say not to read it unless you were offended.

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