After a lot of thought and consideration, I’ve decided to put All About Work on indefinite leave.

I started writing this blog in March 2012. I wanted a place where I could write about topics related to my academic work, but in a less formal, more accessible style. Business media are dominated by conservative voices that generally support employers, so I also wanted to provide an alternative, worker-focused perspective on work and organizations.

I’m very mindful that the education I’ve been so fortunate to acquire has all been acquired in publicly-funded institutions. In my view, that creates a responsibility for me to give back to the community and the public. All About Work is one way for me to do that: by sharing news, information and opinions that might help people, or encourage them to think about things in a different way.

All About Work was not set up to generate income. I pay for the site hosting and for WordPress features like an ad blocker, so ads won’t be randomly inserted into posts that you’re reading. But I don’t include affiliate links in my posts, or use any of the other methods of monetizing blogs. All About Work is very much a labour of love, and I’ve continued running it because I enjoy doing it.

However, in the last six months or so, I’ve seen increasing numbers of referrals – the sources of clicks on posts – from AI-driven tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. These tools scrape and synthesize information from publicly available sources on the Internet, without any compensation to authors and creators. Sorry, AI tech bros, but “exposure” is not enough – and the amount of content from this site that shows up on AI searches goes far beyond any reasonable definition of “fair use“.

The content on All About Work is publicly available for free, but it’s also copyrighted. I strongly object to for-profit sites and services using my copyrighted work without my permission, without credit, and without payment.

In my limited experience with AI, I’ve also seen my work misrepresented. I’ve seen posts on All About Work cited as sources for information that is misleading, or even worse, completely wrong.

Unless WordPress comes up with an AI blocker, I can’t stop AI from stealing my work. But I also don’t have to feed AI by creating even more content for it to steal.

I thought about closing the All About Work site and deleting all 373(!) posts, but I’ve put a lot of effort into this blog and am proud of what it’s accomplished. Also, there is content on the site that as far as I know is very difficult to find anywhere else (such as the diagrams of figures from figure skating tests that no longer exist).

So the All About Work site will stay online. The posts that are already posted will still be available, and I can still be contacted through the site. And I’ll continue to run my other blogs, which for some reason attract almost no AI activity. But until there are some significant changes to how AI operates, I won’t be posting anything new on All About Work.

Thanks to all of the blog’s many supporters and readers over the past 13 years.