I do wonder if I should have framed it differently (but learning that is the point of talking publicly).

It's not will we sell your words. It's will authors pay us to defend them? All your words have already been ingested and no single person has the incentives or money to fight the AI on it.

But we could fight with lawyers, or block the bots, or even worst case, notice the bots and secretly change the content they saw in order to poison their algorithms.

The best deal though is probably just to work with them. We do that with Google already because there is an acceptable exchange of value. They crawl articles on Medium and send search traffic back as a result. The vast majority of articles are crawled but very few receive search traffic back.

I feel like if everyone opts out by default then there isn't a deal to be done with the AI companies. That's more in the camp of authors asking us to defend their rights. I'm not sure that fighting the AI companies is what people mean when they say they want to opt out.

But if it's opt-in by default then there is a pretty decent exchange of value. Presumably the content that is popular on Medium has some overlap with the types of content that a service like ChatGPT is likely to produce. So there's some fairness argument to be made to paying out on popularity. Plus the practicality of that seems overwhelming to me. $0.10/year does very little for anyone writing on Medium, even authors with the absolute lowest cost of living.