AI isn’t stealing your traffic. It’s stealing your authority

When I was Chief of Staff at CoinDesk, I was in charge of the publication’s approach to AI. One of the earliest debates our internal AI committee had was about whether we should allow AI to index our articles or not.

Most of the people on the committee thought we should block AI crawlers. While the fury of media copyright lawsuits had yet to begin, the issue had gotten some traction, and it was easy to make the case that we shouldn’t give our content away to AI companies to summarize unless we were compensated in some way.