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?

  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    31·
    10 months ago

    You are correct. Some of the largest instances block bot traffic, but most don’t, meaning your posts have been seen by AI crawlers and will continue to be so.

    Short of not participating in federation and only discussing things within a private non-federated community on a personal instance or something, I don’t think there’s a way to prevent it.

    • cecep@fedia.ioOP
      3·
      10 months ago

      Thanks for confirming. It’s unfortunate that people who are outraged about Reddit selling their data to AI companies don’t really have an alternative in the fediverse.

      I guess the best hope is for new mechanisms to control AI crawlers to emerge, so they can be blocked per user rather than per domain. Maybe https://spawning.ai will come up with something. One can hope.

      • TheOneCurly@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        I don’t see it as hypocritical at all. Public comments are, for me at least, put out for the public good. The same reason someone might license open source code with the MIT license. My issue with Reddit is that they restricted who can obtain the data and then privately sold them to only the highest bidder. They should be freely available to all who want to view them without restrictions on money or power.

      • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
        0·
        10 months ago

        it really sounds like you really want a walled garden so you can control your… .whatever. the fediverse is public by nature, so discussing how you can control public information is kinda… weird.

        • cecep@fedia.ioOP
          0·
          10 months ago

          Is it? Reddit is technically “public” too in the sense that you can view all the content without an account, yet Google and others pay for the data anyway. And for many years, people made stuff public and could reasonably expect it won’t show up in any major search engines because Google, MS and others respected robot.txt. I know it was never legally binding. I’m also not naive, I know I give up control when I post publicly and there won’t ever be a perfect solution to the AI crawler situation. But a lot is changing right now, regulatory and technologically.

          • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
            0·
            10 months ago

            the fact that google has to pay for the data proves the walled garden you claim is public.

            the fediverse is public, by default. it publicly distributes information to other publicly accessible servers… by default.

            its public information on publicly accessible servers that are opt-out by default. publicly.

            im baffled how people can have some expectation of privacy in such a clearly defined public space.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Mine is but a wee instance, but our bot blocklist is large. For the ones that slip through, once identified as bot traffic, the firewalls go up in their direction.