Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

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

+9
−2

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".

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

What's the harm? (2 comments)

2 answers

You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.

+1
−1

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.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

Types of crawlers (3 comments)
+10
−1

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

We can block at least the OpenAI crawler and the Google-Extended crawler (for Gemini) through the robots.txt file. We've been discussing this in the admin room for the past few days, and while nothing has been done as of yet, the general sentiment has been leaning towards blocking these AI crawlers.

If the community indicates support for such a move, we'll most likely block AI crawlers to the extent possible, at least for crawlers that we're aware of and have documented methods of blocking. (We don't want to block all crawlers, since that would mess up e.g. the Wayback Machine and search engines.)

Update: Cloudflare added the ability to block known LLM bots and we have enabled this for our network.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

2 comment threads

So we'll block only responsible bots (3 comments)
Do it. (2 comments)

Sign up to answer this question »