Among the many things Doctorow gets wrong in That Post is this:

"It's not 'unethical' to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just 'a search engine.'"

Apart from the fact that AI companies are particularly malicious in the way they scrape the web, I'd say we accept search engine scraping mostly on the premise that it's done for the benefit of the scraped sites. There's no such principle of mutual benefit in AI scraping β€” the AI company gets the value of the data scraped and you get bupkis at best, and possibly DDoS'd

@lrhodes I questioned this too. A search engine refers you to the original author or creator's work. It's like the difference between a quote or reference where you name the originator, and plagiarism. Maybe Doctorow is not aware of that distinction. I can forgive him because he seems aware of a hell of a lot of things the rest of us need to know about.