Our take: In “Three strategies for protecting human spaces from bots,” Jill Walker Rettberg responds to an AI agent called Velvet Vale that introduced itself on Air-L, the mailing list of the Association of Internet Researchers, and sparked a lively debate about consent and research ethics. She connects the episode to a recent offer of Usenet posts from the 1980s onward sold as AI training data. Rettberg proposes adding clear copyright licenses to list posts, such as CC-BY-NC, and writing machine-readable ethics notices aimed at AI agents, as LambdaMOO and Wikipedia have done. She also explores more playful tactics of obfuscation and data poisoning drawn from tactical media projects. The post asks online communities to decide openly how their archives may be used in the future.
