I had a warning from the good people at WordPress that one of my blog entries had used someone else’s photograph without permission, and that entry had been suspended until such time as I removed the offending photograph. I will say now that I quite probably did use the man’s photograph without his permission, and that was wrong of me. The entire blog entry has been removed and I hope that’s an end to the issue.

It did get me thinking, though, just how one photograph, hidden away in a little-viewed personal blog should gain the attention of the photograph’s owner. The blog entry was years old and was only one of a few photographs I published, and the only one to cause a stink. My blog isn’t monetized in anyway, I make nothing from it, and I only ever use photographs to illustrate a point, so it bothered me how that one photograph could be picked up and a warning issued.

Then I started thinking about AI. Clearly the owner has set an AI crawler to scour the Internet looking for any instances where his photographs have been used without permission, then to kick off a warning process. It all seemed a bit over the top to me, and like so much else on the Web, quite without context. AI can rarely see through anything that uses nuanced context, an example being the Facebook warning I received about something I’d written and the algorithm had failed entirely to notice the context. People make a great fuss about AI, but until it can understand nuance and meanings beyond the literal, it’s never going to work for me. Back to the photograph crawler, the irony is that the AI systems used will have scraped up his, and many other photographers, work, without permission, in order to perform the task asked of it.

I do think that people concerned about copyright on their work should watermark anything they publish on the Internet. It’s not hard to do, and indicates the intentions of the work’s owners. I guess we could work on the principle that anything published on the Web is automatically copyrighted, but think what that would do to AI systems, if indeed AI systems took any notice at all of copyright, which they rarely do.

No photographs in this blog, copyright or otherwise.