Opinion article by CMS MAG director, Jorge Mediavilla
My question could not be more direct from the outset: What the hell are you waiting for to protect content and its creators, which (in case you hadn’t noticed) are the raw material you depend on? I am appealing above all to open source and specifically to WordPress, because of its immense market share.
I must be very naive, but as soon as I tried generative artificial intelligence for the first time, I knew that content, especially the written word produced by humans, was going to face some very difficult times. And I thought CMSs would be the first to set certain limits to protect their raw material. I was completely and utterly wrong.
None of this has happened. CMSs have worked hard to integrate AI and improve efficiency when entering data, but they have done little or nothing to protect content. Little by little, companies such as Cloudflare and systems for managing bots and content are emerging, but they are not integrated into the core by default and they are now being prioritized because the situation has already gotten out of hand and is generating significant hosting costs, not because of a desire to protect content.
My question is why this was not anticipated and addressed from the very beginning, especially in the case of open source. Do you really not give a damn about content creators? Can’t you see that if we stop creating content, your market share is going to keep plummeting?
Google is already answering (using my own content and against my explicit wishes) many of the questions that digital newspapers wanting to switch CMS used to ask me, through those damned AI Overviews. In other words, it is doing (albeit badly, with errors, inaccuracies and missing data) the consulting work that I used to do and that sustained this project. The result is that the last AInnovación was the final one I will lead and CMS MAG will continue, but no longer with me working on it 100%, instead I will be writing in my spare time. I have found another job as a full time employee.
From here, I am calling for systems to be included by default in the core that can assess and protect creators from Internet bots (not just AI bots), so that we can choose which ones can access the content, which ones cannot and at what price they can train at our expense. If all open source software did this, almost half of the Internet would be protected. Instead, little or nothing has been done and in fact Automattic (the company behind WordPress) signed agreements with various AI companies to provide data for AI training.
If I remember correctly, other popular CMSs, such as Wix and Squarespace, introduced the option to enable or disable the provision of data for AI training, although the default setting was to grant permission (I imagine in exchange for payment). Well, you gave the data to Altman and company and now the mass layoffs are coming and you are trying to turn yourselves into the ideal platform for managing content with AI when AI, once it has the content and the data, does not need you at all. Obviously, now the mass layoffs are coming. And I have found another job. The future of the Internet looks bleak and CMSs can say they have made a decisive contribution to it. Congratulations!
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
