AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt

Andy Reid@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 934 points –
The rise and fall of robots.txt
theverge.com
197

You are viewing a single comment

I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.

if exists("/robots.txt"):
    no it fucking doesn't

Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don't waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It's there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.

1 more...

Yeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It's one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.

1 more...