Medium opened the gate. Now what?
I was cleaning my inbox today and found an email from Medium saying that we can now opt in or out of AI crawling. I checked the settings immediately, unsurprisingly, the default setting leaves the gate wide open to AI crawlers.
I asked myself, should I keep the tab on?
I realised that it depends on the objective of my writing. On Threads and other social media, creators with fewer followers often try every tip possible to get their words out, so I assume they would be open to the change.
For creators and especially writers who’ve already built up their fan base over the years, letting AI display their content via Gemini or other AI chatbots means readers are less likely to return to the original content after reading an extracted or summarised version of their works, which would then impact their income.
So there’s no universally right answer here, for Medium or creators alike. On one hand, Medium needs to embrace AI to stay relevant; if its content doesn’t surface in AI-generated responses, chances are that it will lose ground to other creator platforms. Not that I’m siding with Medium here, as I am aware that the cost would be borne by all the creators that make the platform possible, but one must admit that it’s a business decision that all content platforms need to face at the end of the day. That said, Medium would likely face far less backlash had it made ‘Minimise third-party training’ the default.
On the other hand, opting in or out depends on where creators are in their creator journey, and what matters more to them: exposure or ownership. Creators must revisit the purpose of their creation, as well as the ultimate state they want to achieve.
Which brings me back to the question I asked myself, what is the best course of action for creators. I believe that there must be a way to win this. Many SEO experts keep telling us that to beat GEO or AIO, quality matters. At least it’s a popular and relatively convincing argument, given that nobody fully understands the algorithm by which AI ranks content. So could the golden rule be to create quality content and include insightful perspectives?
That’s what I’ve been doing all along, only write what I have unique to say, even though it means more time to think and write. I’m at peace with that, because I believe that “style” matters. AI can summarise or extract what you wrote, but it can’t capture the nuance: the perspectives built over the years, the way to dissect an argument, the angle you see things, and the tone that makes people want to follow you, rather than just get the answer. That, no crawlers can crawl. A brief moment of self-reflection during a routine inbox clean-out, and, oddly, it now makes me feel less anxious about the whole AI wave.
Are you a fellow creator? What is your view to AI crawling? Give me a shout-out below, or drop me an email to let me know your thoughts. You can subscribe to my newsletter so you won’t miss the latest updates, or check out my other industry shares here.
