I know a lot of authors have been interested in “what Substack can do to protect me from AIs scraping my work,” and I’ve said this before, but the no-bullshit answer is: not very much. We can say “no,” but they can also ignore us.

We’ve been trying to figure out ways we can help / block / make this work for y’all, and we have some exciting ideas (cc

), but this is the state of play: the floor is falling out from under LLM companies. Differentiation seems fleeting, commodification rapid, and there will be few winners. It’s a true sprint to scale: the best a company like Perplexity can hope for is probably acquisition, so they need to get big and do well as quickly as possible so they’re worth buying for Google or Apple or whomever.

For them, the timelines are such that any litigation from e.g. Substack suing them for violating our terms of service would take so long that it’s probably worth the risk: if they do well for 12 months and get acquired, their acquiring company can deal with / settle litigation. It doesn’t help Perplexity to be “legally compliant and good to creators” on this timeline, but it does help them if their LLM product is “the best search” or whatever.

There’s going to be a lot of shit like this, I bet. It’s desperation time, it’s smash and grab time, it’s “do whatever and figure it out later” time for all these companies.