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Blocking AI crawlers on the fediverse (fedia.io)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Given how Reddit now makes money by selling its data to AI companies, I was wondering how the situation is for the fediverse. Typically you can block AI crawlers using robot.txt (Verge reported about it recently: https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders). But this only works per domain/server, and the fediverse is about many different servers interacting with each other.

So if my kbin/lemmy or Mastodon server blocks OpenAI's crawler via robot.txt, what does that even mean when people on other servers that don't block this crawler are boosting me on Mastodon, or if I reply to their posts. I suspect unless all the servers I interact with block the same AI crawlers, I cannot prevent my posts from being used as AI training data?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago

Also, I've already seen complaints about AI companies scraping everything ignoring robots.txt

And we would block the obedient and useful crawlers while doing no harm to malicious