Blocking AI crawlers on the fediverse (fedia.io)

submitted 8 months ago by cecep@fedia.io to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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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[-] will_a113@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 months ago

I wonder if content should carry some license automatically. Like if you agree to the TOS of an instance, your comments are automatically all licensed as CC:BY or CC:O or the more restrictive license of choice of the instance owner.

[-] hollyberries@programming.dev 11 points 8 months ago

There's someone running around lemmy with a creative commons sharealike link as a signature. Quite funny to be honest. I can't remember the username though. They're bound to show up sooner or later :)

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 7 points 8 months ago

Oh yeah it was @onlinepersona@programming.dev

You go champ! If an AI starts ending their posts with a CC BY-NC-SA license I know who to credit!

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 12 points 8 months ago

You're welcome

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[-] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 7 points 8 months ago

I don't think that would make much of a difference. Training AI on copyright-protected data appears to be fair use.

[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 2 points 8 months ago

Yup. There are dumps of Reddit's entire archive of comments and posts available via torrent, I suspect the only reason Reddit's getting paid for that stuff right now is that it's a legal ass-covering that's comparatively cheap. Anyone who's a little daring could use it to train an LLM and if they prep the data well enough it'd be hard to even notice.