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?

  • Tomato666@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 months ago

    Surely the AI crawler company can set up their own node. They post nothing but collect everything going forward from the time they go live?

    • cecep@fedia.ioOP
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      10 months ago

      After reading your comment I was disappointed openai.social doesn’t exist

      • andyburke@fedia.io
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        10 months ago

        They don’t want AI to hate itself, so they don’t want our training data, thankfully.