Those of you who have your own sites, might want to give this a quick look: https://spawning.ai/ai-txt

It’s just a text file, similar to robots.txt, but for AI crawlers, rather than search engine ones. Probably not very effective, as of now, but at least it’s a way to make it clear you don’t conset to your site being used for AI training, without making it suck for human users, in the process.

@thecanine@twtxt.net Ahh good idea!

I had so many complaints about this Web page it wouldn’t fit in a twt. https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240122-terrible-website.xhtml

@mckinley@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Yes, I agree the website itself sucks and the company behind it is incompetent at best - even more so, with their other websites.

Their first site (haveibeentrained.com) was offering a way to search through all the training datasets, not realizing, they were full of illegal porn - so it was quickly shut down.

Now their main gimmick is offering a browser extension, that lets you see what data on any given site you visit, was used for AI training, what has already been marked as “opted out” and a way to add your stuff, to that list.

I don’t like that idea either, adding URLs to a list, should not require questionable browser extensions and in general, opting out all the places that might have your images, doesn’t seem worth the time, if the companies, don’t even have to respect this request.

If you just want the txt file, without additional nonsense, feel free to take the default one, that I use here: https://thecanine.ueuo.com/ai.txt and use or edit it, to match your needs.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also can’t find the user agent string they use, which seems like it would be important information.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org their crawler does not read the robots txt and to my knowledge, neither do any other AI crawlers. As always, they considered themselves exempt, from everything they find inconvenient.