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Comments on What can be done to block Codidact content from getting used by crawlers/for AI training?

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What can be done to block Codidact content from getting used by crawlers/for AI training?

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Given the latest debacle Somewhere Else, where users fear that the site contents will get used for the purpose of training AI, what can be done at Codidact to prevent such from happening?

  • At what extent can we block "crawlers" and the like from stealing site content? What is technically possible?

  • Do the communities want such a block, if technically possible to achieve?

If we would be able to block such crawlers or at least make a statement that Codidact content will never be deliberately used for the purpose of training AI (unless perhaps attribution can be guaranteed), I think that could be some major selling arguments for winning new users over here.

There is a mass exodus of users leaving SE currently because of this and many will be looking for a new "home".

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What's the harm? (2 comments)
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+1
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There is no technical measure that could possibly guarantee that we won't get scraped. It comes down to symbolic gestures and hoping they will comply voluntarily. I do think we should do as many "symbolic gestures" as possible.

  • Indicate in robots.txt that we don't want AI crawlers
  • If there's any heuristic services like what Mithical mentioned for Cloudflare, enable them. I don't think it's worth putting too much effort into writing our own, the scrapers will win that arms race. But just using an existing service allows us to make their life harder with little cost to us.
  • The licensing terms should be updated to say "you may not use the answers to train AIs". This will make the bigger projects avoid us, because their legal department will complain.

These don't actually stop anyone from scraping us, but they make us a less preferential target. While we're small, we become "small risk, tiny reward" and they'll go for other sites that are no risk, small reward. When we're bigger, it ceases to be a technical problem, because they will attempt to bribe or coerce the site admins to do it clandestinely.

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Types of crawlers (3 comments)
Types of crawlers
trichoplax‭ wrote 4 months ago

For your first point, you may want to clarify whether you mean all crawlers or specifically AI data gathering crawlers. At present it isn't clear whether you mean to include search engine crawlers and archival crawlers, and people assuming you do or don't may be voting at odds with your intention.

matthewsnyder‭ wrote 4 months ago

I actually hadn't thought about this, but now I realize it makes matters worse.

Of course the logical thing is to forbid only AI crawlers. If we block search crawlers then the site will disappear from search engines, which would be bad.

However, isn't it very unlikely that major search engine operators like Google would use the search data to train their AIs also?

trichoplax‭ wrote 4 months ago

In the robots.txt file, a website can specify whether it wants search engines to crawl it for inclusion in search results. Even though Google provides both search and AI, these can be specified separately. A website can opt out of AI crawling while still opting in to search engine crawling.