I was approached by a company this week that has trained a large language model on all of the blog posts I have written here at AVC. There are 9059 of them for those that are counting. They wanted to offer me a chat bot called “ask Fred.”

I told them no thanks.

Let me explain.

I am totally fine with anyone using all of the content I have produced here at AVC to train their AI models. When I started AVC, I put a creative commons license on the content here. It has always been my view that anything I write here is in the public domain. You can repost it. You can do what you want with it. I just need attribution and a link back to the original post. That’s been my deal since the earliest days of AVC.

But an AI is not me. When you ask me something, you get my brain on the problem.

I have put a lot of what is in my brain onto the page here at AVC. But I have not put all of it.

I also don’t think an AI has my humanity, my ego, my empathy, my love, or my hate.

Maybe someday that will change. But we are not there yet. I think we are a long way from that.

So if you want to ask Fred something, you will still have to approach me.