Why I’ve Stopped Feeding the Machines

If you’ve been a regular reader here, you’ve probably noticed my posting cadence has changed. Where I used to publish multiple times a month, it’s now sporadic at best—mostly thoughts on AI and what it’s doing to the world we used to know.

This is a deliberate choice, and I feel that maybe I owe you an explanation.

The Model Has Changed

For years, I wrote detailed posts breaking down and sharing legal concepts, real estate and otherwise. As a lawyer who is Board Certified by The Florida Bar in Real Estate Law, I’ve poured my time, expertise, and hard-won knowledge into this blog because I believed in sharing what I’d learned.

The implicit deal was fair: I publish something valuable, search engines connect it with people who need it, and maybe some of those people become clients or at least spread the word. A reasonable exchange.

That deal has died.

Now, I write a 2,000-word post explaining the nuances of marketable title in Florida, and AI crawlers immediately scrape it, chop it up, and regurgitate it along with information the bots have stolen from everyone else, serving it back as an “AI Overview” that makes it look like the machine understood something. The trillion-dollar companies running these crawlers get the value. The searcher gets an answer without clicking through. And I get nothing except the satisfaction of having trained a robot to look a bit more like a board certified real estate lawyer. No thanks.

When you create something, you should have some say in how it’s used. That’s how it used to work. But now the system works something like this: create some content, publish it, and it immediately becomes free raw material for AI systems that are (or soon will be) directly competing with you.

I’m not interested in being unpaid training data for systems that are literally being built to make my professional expertise less valuable. I didn’t consent to that. Nobody asked for that. The bots just took it.

What I’m Doing Instead

I’m focusing my energy on building things that can’t be easily commoditized or synthesized.

Direct work that generates real value for real people in front of me.

Selective writing when I have something to say that matters, not just to feed the content machine.

You Might Disagree

Maybe you think AI is just the next evolution of search and I should adapt. Maybe you think giving away expertise freely is just part of being a professional in the internet age. Maybe you just think I’m being dramatic.

Fair enough. We can disagree.

But I’m choosing to not donate my human insight and experience, built over years of practice, to systems designed to replace human insight, for the profit of trillion dollar companies. I’m choosing to not write detailed analysis that gets instantly converted into synthetic answers that give me no credit and that give readers no reason to engage with me, the actual source of the information.

If You’ve Valued This Blog

Thank you. Genuinely. Knowing that real people read, learned, and occasionally reached out made the effort worthwhile.

I’ll still write occasionally—particularly when I have something to say about what AI is doing to professional expertise, creative work, and the information ecosystem we all depend on. But the era of regular, detailed, freely-given expertise posts about real estate law or a novel legal topic? That’s done. The economics and ethics don’t work anymore.

If you need a Florida real estate attorney, I’m still closing deals and I’d love to help you. And if you want to chat about what AI is doing to the legal profession (or society in general), please reach out as I’m always up for that conversation.

But I won’t be feeding the machines anymore. Thanks for reading.