424: The Future of Content Creation (and Protection) in a World of AI with Paul Bannister from Raptive

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Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Paul Bannister from Raptive. And I know you might be thinking, didn't Bjork and Paul just talk on the podcast? And you'd be right. But they're here for a really important, time sensitive conversation today that you won't want to miss. Paul and Bjork are going to be talking about the future of content creation and protecting your content in a world with AI. As you know, it's super hard to keep up with AI, the technology, the legislation, our understanding of it, everything is changing so rapidly right now and we want to keep you as up to date as possible. As content creators, it's really important that we stay as informed as possible to understand how AI might change the future of food blogging and content creation and what we need to be doing to stay ahead of these changes. Bjork and Paul discuss how the current AI tools like Chat, GPT and Bard are using existing content on the web, just like recipes from food blogs and how online search like on Google might change in the coming years with AI. They also share actionable steps that you can be taking today to protect your content and how you might want to start thinking about the future of content creation in a world with AI. It's really a must. Listen, I know you're really going to get a lot out of it, so I'll just let Bjork and Paul take it away.

Paul, welcome back to the podcast.

Hey Bjork, great to be here.

This is probably the shortest period we've had between interviewing two guests. We're not going to call it an emergency podcast, but sometimes you'll have these podcasts, social media posts people get on Emergency pod, emergency post. It's not that, but it is unique in that it's time sensitive to a certain degree. And the reason is time sensitive because as we know, technology moves very quick. As we also know, the world of AI moves very quick. And one of the things that you're talking about with your team and raptive and working towards is making sure that we as publishers understand the implications of AI. And one of the things that you had mentioned that was so great on a call recently was this idea of Napster. And we think back to Napster. For those who are old enough to remember that, I definitely am. It was sweet spot for me. I was like, oh my gosh, free music. Anytime I want it, I can just download it. And you were saying on a call recently, this idea that the music industry really didn't move quickly enough to react to Napster in a way where things evolved quickly, it moved past it and the potential long term damage that came from them not being able to move quickly. And how potentially we as publishers, creators, people who are writing content, putting it online, creating photos, putting it online, could the story arc could kind of be the same for us potentially. Can you talk a little bit about that analogy and like why we're right now kind of in the middle of that as publishers.

Yeah. And to back up even a step further, I try not to be melodramatic or sky is falling Pollyanna, but there's a distinct possibility that the rise of generative AI is as big of a deal for society, the world, certainly content creation and the larger industry that that is that it's as big of a deal as the printing press, which is like sort of a ridiculous statement and why I hate to be melodramatic, but, like, it could actually be like, I was around at the beginning of the Web, which was like an enormous deal, and I feel like this is as big for sure. So with that as the backdrop, I think that, you know, if you agree with the point that AI is a huge deal, if you agree with the point that AI will definitely be very disruptive, then you start asking the question, well, what are the things it's going to disrupt and what are the challenges it's going to create? And I think the pure again in the simplest, most basic sense, like content creation, which includes writing and photography and art and music and screenwriting. And it's why the actors and everybody are on strike right now. It affects literally anything where people are creating. Content of some form can be disrupted by this. And so if you agree with that as the backdrop of everything, then the Napster analogy I think is a pretty good one where it's like massive disruptive change that only affected one particular industry, which was music. And the music companies were like, oh, like, this is fine. Oh, we're going to use the same old tricks we've done before. We're going to sue people. And they sued a bunch of college students and stuff, or stealing music.

Yeah, I remember that. And as a college student, I remember being like, oh, no.

Yeah, yeah. And it clearly backfired because if you look at the. They were slow, they did the wrong things, they were reactionary, they assumed it would go away. And if you look at like, revenue data for the music industry, you know, I don't have it in front of me, but, like, I think, like, I think it took till this year or last year for the music industry to be as big as it was in 2000. Like, they had such a massive hit because they were really behind in terms of the technology. The technology got the better of them. They reacted the wrong way. And ultimately, like, you know, music's a good example. Like, they have a valuable asset. Like people who create music. It's an amazing skill, it's amazing art, and people will pay for it if it's packaged the right way. But, like, finally it's kind of getting to a place where it is. So I think that that moment for music is now kind of like multiplied because it's for any form of content creation. So I think that for in the scope of what we're talking about here, people who create content online, food specifically, but really any kind of online Content creator, like you've got to be looking at AI and saying, can this make better content than me? Is this going to kill my search results? Is this going, you know, who's stealing my content and using it to feed these systems? There's all these questions that are wrapped up into it that are really complicated and scary and yeah, if we don't actively lean into this like we all could be kind of napsterized for the next couple of years.

Yeah, if people napsterize. Did you say was that? I want to. Yeah, I'm going to figure out how to use that word more often. Love that. But point being, if we just sit back and we're like, whatever, like this is just technology, it's how technology works. These companies, these AI companies, if there is not any pushback against it there, there's no incentive for them to be more generous with like links or crediting. And so for those who aren't familiar, can you talk about what's happening when you say generative AI? Number one, what does that mean? And then number two, how does a company that's producing generative AI content get to the point where they're able to do that?

So generative AI is artificial intelligence technology that can generate new stuff, typically content. And the three forms of content that are mostly being produced today are text based content. So ChatGPT is the best example, or Google Bard. You go to one of those systems, you type in. One of the best scenarios I've been using it for is travel. I'm going to Lake George in upstate New York next week. And I typed in, you know, I have a family of four and I have two kids this age and this age and we're going to Lake George and what are some of the places to go that are in the area? And ChatGPT and Bard gave me great recommendations of things to do. But I dug deeper on afterwards and went to some sites to look at information, but they gave me phenomenal information. So it's generating content for me that's text. You've got image based generative AI like mid journey people played with that or stable diffusion, which honestly both of them are like unbelievably amazing to literally be able to type in. Show me an image of a panda bear wearing a gangster outfit and like 10 seconds later you've got a picture of a panda bear wearing a gangster outfit. And it's unbelievably good. Really cool. And then the newest form, which is still very early days film but kind of works in different forms, is Generative video. There's a tool called Runway, there are some others where you can type in very simple video things and it'll make you a three or four second video clip out of the blue. And it's really, really amazing. So it's like amazing technology. I think a lot of people have used ChatGPT probably the most, but maybe mid journey, maybe stable diffusion. And you can see in a lot of cases how impressive it is and how it can create things in certain scenarios that are almost as good as what a person would make.

Yeah. And it's interesting because it's helping us do what we need to do. And so what we need to do as Internet users is in this case, it's, it's information. Like we need information, we're doing travel, we need recipe, we need advice. Like I used it for the context of a conversation, like a problem I was working through just as an experiment. I use Bard. Like, hey, I'm doing, I'm thinking through this. What are your thoughts on it? And like it gave me some great back and forth considerations. But the, the way that it does that, the reason that it's able to do that is because it's taken all of the content of the Internet or a lot of it, most of it, like the best of it, and it's essentially just like, this isn't the technical way to describe it, but like it's essentially like stuffed it into a big computer brain and then said it's like kind of like Neo and matrix. Like learn this. It just plugs in, it learns all of it and then is conversational. That's like the intelligence part where you're able to talk to it and it's as if it understands you. So you can use natural language, it has historical context around your conversation. But within the our industry specifically, what you could do is you could go to like Bard. And for anybody who hasn't done this and you're listening to this podcast, you need to like pause the podcast or keep listening to the podcast. Do it right now. Go to bard.google.com or search chat GPT and go to, you know, create an account, use you can, it's free. And at least try some of these prompts just to get an idea of what's happening. Like you could say, what's a good pancake recipe? Or give me the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and it will give you a recipe. And the reason that it's able to do that is because it's looked at hundreds of recipes and sometimes cookbooks, even like that are available online and it's kind of compiled all of those into its own recipe. And so the risk here for creators is that this gets good enough where the problem that somebody has, which is, I need a recipe, the solution that doesn't change, they'll still need that. The solution for how they get that could potentially change. And it could go from going to Google and searching for it, or going to Pinterest, clicking on an image and instead going to Bard and saying, what's the best recipe for blueberry pancakes? And it will give it to you, you make it and you're on with your day. And that, you know, if a thousand people do that and then 10,000 and then a million, that changes user patterns. Is that an accurate description of kind of the risk analysis?

100%. And I think like, embedded in your statement are like the two fundamental, two of the fundamental challenges. One is, you know, you talked about the prompts if you go to ChatGPT or bar like things to try and it's like, show me a good recipe for pancakes. That's exactly what people are doing now with search. And in a world and today, when you type that into Google, you get 10 blue links back. And if you've got a really good pancake recipe and you're ranking number three, that's awesome, you win, you get a bunch of traffic. In the world where the AI system is giving the recipe, there's no links, there's no necessity for links anymore. The recipe is just given to you there because the system built it for that person. So there's no links anymore. So that's risk kind of issue number one. And issue number two, as you mentioned, the system has scanned hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pancake recipes and has basically distilled what is the essence of a pancake and what makes a great pancake based on 10,000 data points. And so effectively, if you've got a great pancake recipe that was searching, you know, ranking in search today, that recipe is an input to its ability to make a good pancake recipe. So it's like they're taking your content to make a pancake recipe where the system is telling you what it is and they're no longer sending traffic to you. So like both sides of the equation, you're kind of getting the short end of the stick on.

Yeah, you've helped by essentially powering the knowledge that this AI, whether it's, you know, bard or bing or chat GPT, chatGPT being what is powering Bing. But you've given it that. But then you're also literally just not given any credit. Like you're not compensated for allowing that to happen. And there's also no kind of like referral compensation for the link that's eventually clicked, which is why SEO exists because the thought is you're going to be able to produce content for less than what it, what you're getting from when somebody visits your site, whether that be buying a product or advertising revenue, as is in the case with reptive or selling products. And so the, the question that I have kind of related to that and we curious to hear your opinion on is, you know, let's use Bard as an example. Being that it's closest to Google or it's within Google. Like the way that Google makes money is by links and including links to sites and it's like this massive cash cow. They're crazy amount of money that they're making from that. And if you use Bard right now, there's not any of that. So it's not like a money making mechanism for it. Right now my curiosity is within the context of a search engine or something that was a search engine that now is like an AI chat interface, do you think there's any potential that like Google needs to figure out how to bring links into it because that's the only way that they're making money. And therefore is the potential with something like Bing or Google, where links are being introduced and like partial answers are given that result in search traffic. Have you heard any kind of industry chatter around that?

I think, you know, like the scary thing, I'll do the scary thing. And then the comforting thing, the scary thing is that there's nothing to stop Google from putting paid links into the AI results. No organic links. And for the vast majority of the people we work with and content creators on the web in general, you don't pay for links, you get organic links. So they could easily say we're going to put our three paid links on top of the chat results, but then bury or completely disappear the organic links. It's like, like that's like fear number one. I think on the other side, like Google at least has a large vested interest in continuing to send traffic to websites. They make money on those websites too. If the results are better, users are happier, they come back more often. Like there's a lot of reasons why they don't really want to upset the Apple card too much too quickly. So I'm like optimistic that like that worst case scenario like won't happen soon. But if competitive pressures increase on Google or different things start happening, they may have to move faster. But like I'd be optimistic for now, it won't be that terrible in the near future. But like this is all moving very fast and hard to see where you know when things are going to change.

Sure. It's almost like if you're using just Google as the, the AI engine that we're looking at, maybe the risk isn't there. It's actually more for the companies that don't have an incentive to prioritize links like ChatGPT or whatever next generative AI company comes around and trains on a bunch of content. That's where the risk is, where it's a completely new business model, they operate differently and people go there, they start to get into the rhythm around using that as their solution for things. Is that accurate?

I think that's exactly right. I think that, and that's what I think Google is like playing that game where they're like, we don't need to blow up the way search works right now. We can improve search, we can iterate on it, we can add AI based features so we can make it smarter. But they don't need to blow it up right now because it's still their cash cow and it's still, there's a big ecosystem that they've built there and they don't have that pressure. But if ChatGPT figures out some amazing new search oriented Chat system, which ChatGPT is not, it's not there yet and users are flocking to it, that's where Google will start having to be like, okay, now they've got hard choices to make. Do we like chase what chat GPT is doing to make a user interface or do we kind of, how do we protect our cash cow that we have today? So right now that pressure is not there, but it could happen at any point.

Yeah. What it takes is a breakthrough product that has quick adoption for users that then makes the current player Google that's dominating have to react to say like we need to keep people from going over there, so we need to create something that's similar to that. So what does that, where does that put content creators? Like what, what do we do? What are our options? And you know, there's, if we talk about these paths forward, what, where's the path forward? Where this continues to be industry where people can build a business, be successful with it, create content and get compensated for it. Like let's talk about that path.

Right? So you know, one, one simple Thing I think every time I've been on this podcast, I've said the same thing over and over again, which is like, great quality content wins. So it's like, I think like, step one with all of this for, from a content creator perspective is like, keep making good content. Like, the better your content is, the more users will like it. The more people want to send traffic to it, the more people want to come back. Like, you know, there's other forms of traffic beyond search. Like, diversify what you're doing. Like, there's a, there's a, like, keep doing a great job. Keep engaging your audience. That always has to be the most important thing for sure. That's like Bucket one, I think Bucket two then is starting to look at again, thinking back to the examples of Napster, looking at what's happening right now in the world, and you've got all these giant media companies like the New York Times and the Associated Press and Meredith and Hearst and others starting to negotiate with the AI companies for different aspects of their business, trying to figure out, can we be compensated for this? Can we have certain guarantees in place, like, what are the things, you know, what are the conversations to be having today to reduce the possibility that we all get Napsterized? Which is not a coin, I'm going to keep saying. Yep.

Yeah.

And so I think that that's the other part of it is like, what's the right way to engage in the larger world, to have a seat at the table and figure out, you know, what does the, like, no one knows what the world is gonna look like five years from now. We all know it's gonna look different, but we don't know what it's gonna look like. And how do we become active participants in like, setting that future rather than letting it happen to us?

Yeah. And so when you say these companies are negotiating seat at the table, you know, I hear different companies, like Reddit as an example, talking about charging for access to their site. Can you talk about what's happening there? Like, what, what does that mean when you look behind the scenes and see the deal that's being done with an AI company? Have those deals been done or is it just negotiation right now? What does that look like?

As far as what is publicly known, only one deal has been done, which is the Associated Press struck a deal with OpenAI, which makes GPT to allow OpenAI to use a whole bunch. The Associated Press has content from the last hundred years or something like that. Like, they've got enormous amounts of historical information and so they provided that data to OpenAI to, to use in their system and that was kind of a paid deal. No one knows what the price was. I probably, my guess is it wasn't that much money, but it sounds really good. That's the only like known deal. There are probably some other deals that happen behind the scenes that are a little bit less there. We know in the image world there have definitely been deals done there, but in the text oriented world there's only really been that one.

So in that case, what it was is OpenAI Associated Press said, like, you can't crawl our site. Like how did that, you know, functionally how that happened.

And yeah, I think part, part of it for the Associated Press was a bunch of the content they have, they don't publicly release in a very usable format.

Got it. So they maybe. Yeah, yeah.

They give them like special stuff that you can't get just like by scraping a website. So like they had a little bit of leverage there where it was like, we've got really important valuable things and you can't have it otherwise. And it's, yeah.

Behind a paywall or like abstracted in some way that it couldn't be crawled. And so it wasn't a matter of them clawing it back and saying, you can't have this. It was more a matter of OpenAI saying, like, how do we get this? And they're like, you pay for it.

Yeah, yeah.

Versus anything on the open web. Like most of the sites that we're talking about right now, they can just crawl that. You know, there's nothing you can do to stop it at this point. Is that right?

There are beginning to be some things you can do to stop it. OpenAI announced last week or not sure when this podcast is coming out, but in early August that they have now GPT bot, which is like a, which is just like this googlebot that crawl sites and helps index your site for search. GPT Bot is a bot that OpenAI uses to scrape your site to pull your data to use in their system. And you can now block that bot in your, you know, in your CMS from scraping your site going forward. So that's like the, the first truly controllable thing that's been put out in the world. But it's very binary. You're either like all your information scraped or you block everything. Like there's no, like, you know, I think part of it is, I think a lot of people would say, well, you can take my stuff if you pay me for it. And again, no one knows what the model is yet for being paid. But that's, that's a, that's the kind of negotiation that I think those are the early kinds of conversations that are happening, even though no one quite knows what the model is yet. But for now, you can Start blocking the ChatGPT bot if you want to do that.

And how do you do that? It's similar to like a nofollow type or a noindex type tag that you would do with Google if you don't want it to index a certain page.

So it's robots. Txt. So I think you have to use like Yoast or some other plugin like that to modify that on your server. I am not a CMS expert outside of your expertise. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I know, I think you can do it in Yoast. And there's, I'm sure, I know we publish on our blog information on how to block it if you want to. Great.

And so Yoast, for those who aren't familiar, it's a plugin that is made by a company that's specialized. They have lots of different plugins. Yoast was the name. We actually did a Food Blogger Pro interview with him years ago. And they have an SEO plugin. And so the SEO plugin allows you to do certain customizations and specializations. One of the things you can do for those who aren't familiar is you can tell Google to. You can tell Google to not index something. And you might think, why would you ever do that? Well, maybe you have a certain page on your site that you want to have available, like an email signup page, but you don't want that to be indexed, but you want it to be available on your website. You might tell Google that the bot that comes and crawls your site, you don't want that to be indexed. You couldn't previously do that with AI, but now it sounds like with ChatGPT, OpenAI has released some information that is essentially like, like insect repellent for the spider that comes and crawls your site. And you're like, no, I don't want you here. Go away. So then it just leaves. But then the flip side of that is, like, you're just aren't going to be included in, in this case, results from ChatGPT. Is there any risk that you think with that? I mean, I think the risk would be more so with like a Bard. If you're telling, like, we don't want Bard to crawl our site, which you can't do now, and it would probably be complex. But do you. Would there be any risk to say, like, hey, we want to be excluded from ChatGPT, and then they come out with this gangbusters feature that sends a bunch of traffic? I don't think that'll happen, but.

Right, right. I think the risks are things that are sort of unknown like that. Like maybe there was some gangbusters thing. If you're not in the system, you lose, you don't get traffic. That's a risk. I think if later there is some compensation model where they pay you per article for access to your content and you are out of the index, you don't get paid. Like there's stuff like that, but they're very unknown. So it's.

I think, yeah, it's all speculative.

We're recommending people do it, but it's, you know, it's not like a slam dunk either way. It's definitely a complicated situation.

Right, that makes sense. And part of it is there would only be incentive for an OpenAI to pay for content if the majority of the sites that they want to get content from are blocking them. And if not, then there's not incentive because they can just continue to crawl it.

So the pancake analogy is a great one where it's like, I don't need, you know, let's, let's look right now, very quickly. Pancake recipe returns. Well, this is probably wrong, but 599 million results on the web, that's probably wrong. But let's assume there are tens of thousands of pancake recipes on the web. Even half the people block them. There's still tens of thousands of pancake recipes that it has access to, and therefore it's hard to really cut back on that access at this point.

Sure, yeah, that makes sense. So there's some things that we can do. My guess is you'll have more control over time of what that looks like. I think the OpenAI node is a great one. I wasn't aware of that. But we'll be sure to like, link to any resources within the show notes so people can check that out. My guess is just with a simple Google search, they'd be able to figure out how to do that. The thing that's hard for an independent creator is like, we're kind of on our own. Like, we're just trying to like, figure out how we can produce content, like get some stuff up on social media, get a good night's sleep and also spend time with our kids. And then you have the considerations around OpenAI and these paying for rights to our content. So what does that look like for the independent creator who we can do little things, like you said, we can put a no index bot thing on our site to keep OpenAI from ingesting our content. But what are the other things, things that we can be doing? And I know that Raptive is kind of pushing some initiatives forward for independent creators as well. Can you talk about those too?

Yeah, sure. So the first one, again, let me step back for a second. I think ultimately what the collective we would like to do is influence Google, OpenAI, other AI companies to come up with fair models for making sure we all keep getting good search traffic, making sure that if there's a deal to be done around being compensated for content, that the collective, we are a part of that and just making sure that there are fair outcomes for creators. That's what I think we would all say. Those would be good things. We all want those things. If we're going to influence those companies. You have to think about the ways to influence those companies. Those companies want to make a lot of money. They want to not have governments come down on them in a big way, particularly companies like Google that are enormous and have lots of government pressure on them. They want to have good press, and so they want those things. And so we think about influencing those companies through those things. How do we push them to do things that we collectively want? By being in the press. How do we collectively push them to do things we want? By influencing advertisers who pay them. How do we collectively push them to do things? By talking to governments and saying, hey, this is unfair. This is what's happening. So those are the kinds of things that we think are important to starting to think about influencing those companies. So step one is we release this, an open letter, which you can sign at protect content creators.com and by doing that, you put your name on it. We would also love it for, you know, creators, bloggers, to share it with their audiences. Because we want real people to sign it. We released it a few weeks ago. We have thousands of signatures. Now. We want to get to way more than that. And I think that proving to the world that people care about content creators, people want them to be compensated for what they do, people want them to be able to make a living like, you know, many of your listeners do, is really important. And we want real people to sign that, because that's a real proof point. When people believe something, it goes a long way. That's bucket one is the open letter.

And to talk about that a little bit. So protect content creators dot com. This can be anybody. It could be my mom, it could be us, it could be anybody who wants to get behind this idea of protecting content creators in the world of AI.

Yeah.

And what you're doing in signing that is just saying, I believe in this. And you can see the specifics of what it would be. You know, there's kind of these three points, main points on the side. Content creators interest must be a central consideration. Trust and transparency must be preserved. And third, content creators deserve control and compensation. And so it's essentially this collective effort to say, hey, here's this voice of thousands of people that provides a little bit of evidence, a lot of evidence towards government, towards big companies like Google to say this is important to people in, in their thinking about it. And here's some evidence as to that.

Yep, yep. Because the reverse of that is. And that's exactly right, the reverse of that is that the White House a month ago or so put out a whole bunch of like, principles for how to like regulate AI. None of them talked about content creators, even though, again, that's where the data all comes from. And then the EU recently, I don't know if the act is fully in law yet, but they have an AI act which is, will be the first government action around AI in the world, doesn't mention content creators either. So it's like governments are already going down these paths to put regulations in place, which is probably good. I'm not saying what's in there isn't right, but it certainly doesn't talk about content creators at all. And we want to make sure that content creators have a seat at the table and real people signing the open letters is a proof point that like, this is a necessary component of, you know, in that case regulation. But, but other, other things as well.

Right. Versus an individual company going and being like, hey, we think this is important. It's kind of like thousands of individuals and thousands of individuals who represent companies going to people and saying this is important. And also a reminder of like, there's thousands of these small businesses who also employ other people that this is really important to. Like, it's just a reminder for these people who maybe have one filter or one way to look at it that are creating, you know, making decisions to be like, oh yeah, this is something that we also need to consider, whether it be somebody at Google training a model or somebody at, you know, some government level that's creating rules and regulations around it. If you can tell A story of it being a team of three people in Minnesota and this is their job and livelihood. We need to consider that that's kind of what's happening here.

Exactly. Like job creation, economic impact of blogging and content creation online is huge and something we're collecting a lot of data on because it is so important to get people to pay attention.

Got it. So that was. You said that's kind of the first thing you were going to go in. Talk about kind of a second consideration.

So the second consideration, again, a little bit of backstory. About two months ago, the Washington Post had an article and released a data set that is public information, but they basically found all of. They found where all the data in OpenAI systems come from and they ranked it by domain.

Oh, interesting.

So two data points came out of that for us that we thought were relevant. So the first thing, just to tell a bit of a story. So it's ranked by domain, like where the data comes from. The biggest contributor to the OpenAI system is actually Google Patents, apparently google patents.google.com, if you care about it, has every patent ever published. It is an enormous data set. It is the single largest contributor of information to the opening system. Okay, fine. The second is some UGC side, I forget the name of it. The third is the New York Times. The New York Times contributes 0.06% of all data in the OpenAI system. So think about that. Probably the biggest news organization in the world. It's only 0.06% of the system, so it's pretty small in the grand scheme, but it's still the third biggest. We aggregated all 4,500 of our sites, or almost 5,000 now, and we represent collectively 0.6. So 10 times more data comes from our creators than comes from the New York Times.

That's like one.

So we have like fairly large scale there. Second, and we're doing this for other content verticals, but we did it for food, which is relevant to this podcast and of data in the OpenAI system that is food related. Over 30% of it comes from raptive creators. So it is an enormous, enormous, enormous component of that data set. And so what that says to us is that the collective, we are large and have power and should use that. And we should be part. We should really. The New York Times is out there negotiating with these companies. We need to be out there negotiating with these companies on behalf of all of our creators. And that gets to the second thing, which is something we call cara, which is the consent to advocate for responsible AI. And what that is is it's a short contract that we have now given to our near 5,000 creators. And it's all opt in. You don't have to sign it if you don't want to. But if you do sign it, what it does is effectively gives us rights to negotiate on your behalf. So we can go to OpenAI, we can go to Google, we can go to the government, we can go to different, other different bodies and say we have rights from all of these creators to have a seat at this table and negotiate a good deal for them and make sure that their traffic is protected, that they get compensated, they can have control of their content, they understand how it's being used and all those things. And that's. So that's the second thing is this document called Cara, which is this short contract.

Yeah. And so to recap that was it. The was the post called Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like Chap GPT sound smart. Okay, so it's a Washington Post article. We'll link to it to recap what you're saying there. Essentially what they did is through some learning process, who knows how it was, they took a best guess as to like, where was this information being pulled from?

This is getting into super nerdy wonky stuff. OpenAI got all the data for its system from a different system called Common Crawl. And that data is all public. And Washington Post got all the Common Crawl data because it's public and they reorganize it in a way to make it more useful. So it's not even the best guess. It is literally where it comes from that OpenAI.

So they went through this process to understand where ChatGPT was training their data from. And when you look at it, your point was New York Times was.066. Yeah, 0.06% of that like entitled entire kind of body of content. When you, when you roll up all of the raptive creators, 4, 505,000 creators, that also was 0.0, 6.6, 0.6.

So 10 times.

Okay, so 10 times more, which is just incredible. Kind of the, the power of the collective voice of 4,500 5,000 sites. But when you look at just the food vertical, which we're talking about, it represented 30%. And so suddenly it's like this massive amount of representation for just this, you know, raft of creators. And you have that data because you have all those sites. But my guess is if you expand that out to just like independent creators, that it becomes 50 60, 70%, probably more of what ChatGPT is training on is independent creators content.

Exactly, exactly.

And so a lot of the value from anything food related is coming from what we're creating individually. It's all wrapped up, it's put into this model which then spits out result based on whatever the prompt is that people have have to ask.

Yep.

You were saying, creating this initiative. Kara C A R A to speak on behalf of in this case raptive creators. You know any of these situations where there is the potential to say like hey you needed, we need to get compensated for this or whatever it might be TBD on what that is. How about for the people who aren't able to do that? Like that being a raptive exclusive thing, like you're just an independent creator. Maybe it's like the naps are comparable as like you don't have a label and you're not signed on to something. Are there other options for what you can be doing or looking at? What should you be considering? Could you look your attorney up in the white pages?

Yeah, it's a good question that I don't have a great answer to yet. I mean, you know, this is all moving very fast and it's very much like at the beginning of all these things right now as we go out and start negotiating in bigger ways, like who knows, maybe things, maybe we negotiate things that are broader or opinion outcomes of the system that applies more across the board. None of us quite know how it's going to shake out. So I think for now, I think probably the most important thing is just be educated, learn about what's going on, pay attention. Obviously our blog and other sources have good information about things as they're happening. So I think that's probably the most important thing. And then we'll, you know, as this all evolves and changes, there may be other options for people in the future too.

Yep. How about. Has there been any noticeable impact from a search perspective that you've seen from the data that you have? You know, it still is at, in, in, in my world at least when I'm talking to people, I know it's probably not in your world but like as soon as we get outside of the context of like digital publishing and our, our blog and stuff, people are like, oh yeah, I've heard of it but like how does it work? What do you do with it? Like any of my friends are like yeah, I've kind of, I've heard of it and I was talking to my friend who's a professor And I was like, probably kids are using it. And he sent me this block of text and he's like, do you think this is AI generated? And I did this like, you know, AI generative test. And it's like 98% probability that this is. So it's. You're starting to see it, but not necessarily. It's not ubiquitous. It's not like search where everybody's doing it every day. But have you noticed any data around that like seeping into search or. Not yet.

So not yet. There is. Google has a. Google has an experiment running and they call it a search generative Experience SGE that there's a beta test you can join and you can check it out if you want to. And it's sort of like barred but like on steroids, but really is a much deeper version of like modifying the way search works. If that SGE system was deployed to search, it would definitely be very bad for creators of all shapes and sizes. It is far fewer links. It is far more the answers on the page. It's vertical specific. I think food actually is a more protected content vertical right now. Like bots don't have taste buds. So like they should. While it has a lot of pancake recipes, it really doesn't know what makes a good pancake at the end of the day. But it's getting better and better and better. So if that SGE system was. Became the main search, it would be very bad. Again, I'm sort of confident that Google isn't going to upset the Apple cart that quickly here. So I think what they're going to do is take components of that and start pointing into main search over time. But it's going to take time. Some people are worried that that's going to happen as soon as this, you know, the end of this year. Again, we're more optimistic that it will take longer, it'll be smaller, it'll change more, you know, more bits and pieces. But, but you know, Google is certainly thinking about search experiences that are way, you know, way de. Prioritizing content creator results.

Yeah. Because they, and you see this in different instances, they're incentivized to provide the best answers possible while also getting people to click on paid ads like.

Exactly.

Generally speaking, that's what Google is trying to do. And if they can find ways to provide an experience that, that will keep people using Google while also continuing to click on ads, that's what they're going to optimize around. Exactly, exactly. But they also. The interesting thing within it is like Also need to figure out how to continue to incentivize creators to create content. Like in a future five to ten years from now, if people aren't incentivized to create content, then these engines aren't going to be able to be trained. So not that we know how this will all play out, but it'll be just so interesting to see, like, how do incentives change? How does alignment change? And it's part of the reason why. To go back to the Napster analogy, it's important to have a voice right now because those decisions are being made and the trajectory is being set, directionally speaking, as, as to where that goes. Does that feel accurate?

A hundred percent? 100%? I think it's, yeah. No one knows where this is going to end, but like, it is, it is going to be a big set of changes. And we think the most important thing is just to be, you know, have a seat at the table and be a part of the conversation and not just like sitting back and like, hoping for the best.

Yep, that's great. So as we wrap up, I think it would be good to have kind of an outline, like, what does it look like for us as creators to continue to do our job? Well, like you said, it's like, this could be a very big thing and is a very big thing. Like, it just is. It's significant. It doesn't mean that everything is changing right now, but things are changing. And so I think what I'd be, what I'm trying to get at is like, how do we get to a place where we can stay the course, but also be aware and be educated and maybe recapping what some of those things might be. So for instance, you had mentioned continue to create good content, like, at its core, whether it's written on a site, on a blog, on YouTube, the business of like engaging with people and being human and connecting with people, that will continue to exist even though what it looks like will change. So figure out how to continue to get good at that. Creating good content, content that connects.

I would also add one tweak to that a little bit that I think is more and more important. And the word human is so important here. The world doesn't need the 47821st pancake recipe. Like, we've got it covered, we're going pancakes. But if you as a person are special and interesting and other people like you and believe in you, your pancake recipe can be better because those people care about you. So I think it's like, it's also like, it's make great content, but, like, be you and be unique and find your audience that loves you and, you know, make that that new next pancake recipe great and special, not just number 47,821.

Yeah, it's the difference. Like, content continually in and of itself, information becoming commoditized. Like it's available. People have it. Like, it's hard to create an incrementally better pancake recipe, but you have a strategic advantage in being unique with who you are. But the interesting thing with that is, like, it's a little bit of balancing of these two worlds. One of the worlds is like search optimization, which is like looking what are other people doing? How do I rank higher? Like, how do I include that? Which is important and it works. But also within that, to not get sucked so deep into that world that you create this faceless content that nobody connects with, even if it ranks well. So there's this. This, like, yin and yang balancing act that exists, which I don't have an answer for it, but it's just acknowledgement of it.

It's a real challenge. But I think if you could walk that line, that's where the biggest success is.

Yeah. And as much as possible, figure out how do you position the content that you are creating in a way that is unique, not necessarily just because of the content itself, but also because of who you are. Maybe it's like your approach to life, how you connect with people, the angle that you take. I talk about this all the time on the podcast, but Kevin Kelly always talks about a thousand true fans. Like, how do you get those people who are like, I love this site, I love this person. I love following this because of whatever it is they're. You know, how they write, they're really funny. They always make things in this certain way, like having an angle and being human. I think that's great. But also within that, staying educated. So that would be another piece like creating great content, being human, but also not putting your head in the sand and pretending like it doesn't exist. You mentioned Raptive's blog as a place to go. Where are the other places that you can stay educated as to, like, the things that are happening in this world? Twitter probably, like, is a great place for these conversations.

I think Search Engine Land, which is like kind of a site that covers, like, news about certain search engines, particularly Google, if you want the slightly deeper, more technical stuff, is a really good site and has tons of good information there on what Google is doing. What Google in particular is doing around AI and then I think just Google searching in general for you know, what's the news around, around ChatGPT, around Google Bard and just following those things.

Yeah, that's great. So I see even here the most recent or a post that came out today while we're recording Google search generative experience, which you were talking about adds SGE while browsing. So like, okay, there's this new update on SGE kind of interface that you talked about and they have some more information on that. So that's great. So shout out to Search Engine Land. Anything else that you would add for us to be considering, like for those in the content creation world, you know, the two kind of pillars for this specifically, hey, stay the course. Think about creating human centered content, connecting with an audience. Not just like blindly going after search results to go after search results, but also thinking about how are you connected in and how can you be kind of the human competitive advantage. Follow along, stay educated. Search Engine Land, you know, we'll continue to talk about on this podcast, Wrapped it blog. You know, Google has their own blog where they talk about stuff that they're releasing. Any other considerations for us like as creators as we go out into the world in regards to this kind of category of content?

One of the things that's connected to like being human I think is also, you know, diversifying traffic, which we talked about a little bit before. Search is huge. That's not going to go away. You got to make content for a search and walk that line that you were talking about before. But I think, you know, the more you are you and the more you are unique, the more that people care about you and then you can get some traffic from social and you can build your email list and like what are ways that you can get traffic that are, that like you know, search is going to be the bulk of track for people for the, for the time being for sure. But you know, every couple of percent that you get from somewhere else is really good and something you can own more. And again, I think uniqueness and being you I think is a way to help with that. So it's just a side point, but I think it's important too.

Yeah. And the, the fun thing to think about there is the game you play is different. Like I don't think about SEO for the podcast like exactly. And it probably should to some degree. Like we, there's probably considerations around search optimization for podcasts, not within Google, but maybe within like a podcast player, things like that, which we do have you know, kind of descriptions and things like that. But, like, the podcast is a very different game that doesn't require me ever to, like do deep search optimization. Same could be true for the social platforms. Like, they all allow you to play a different game and so the only game is in search. And I think it's an important one, especially for sites where you're publishing stuff. But it's not the only game. And so I think that's a good reminder to think about diversification on different platforms, not only from a traffic standpoint, but also just from like a fan and following standpoint.

So, yes, totally.

Paul, if people want to follow along with you, I know that you're on X. Do you call it X yet? Have you transitioned over into calling it X?

I call it Twitter till the day I die, I think.

Okay, but other places that folks can follow along with you or wrapped over the team, I think.

Yeah, I think for me, Twitter is the best place to follow along with what I'm talking about. Pbanist is my handle and I know for raptive, I know our Instagram is very active and Twitter, we post things on LinkedIn, we post things on. So definitely check all those out.

Well, Paul, thanks so much for coming back on. Really appreciate it. Great conversation. Always good to nerd out and we'll be in touch again soon. Thanks.

Thanks very much.

Hey there, Alexa here and thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We really appreciate you being here. If you really like this episode, we would so appreciate you leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show get in front of new listeners and it just makes us really happy. We read each and every one and it's just so great to hear from you what you're liking and what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. So all you have to do is go and find the Food Blogger Pro podcast on your Apple podcast app, scroll down to the ratings and reviews section, and then you can rate the show and then leave a written review if you want to be even more awesome. And while you're there, we would really appreciate if you subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. But maybe you talk about one of your favorite interviews on the show, or maybe you just talk about the show as a whole. But regardless of what you talk about in your review, we appreciate it so, so much. So thanks again for tuning in today. We'll see you next time. And until then, make it a great week.