robots.txt is a suggestion

tekeous@usenet.lol to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 616 points –
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No it's not, what a weird take. If I publish my art online for enthusiasts to see it's not automatically licensed to everyone to distribute. If I specifically want to forbid entities I have huge ethical issues with (such as Google, OpenAI et. al.) from scraping and transforming my work, I should be able to.

Nothing in my post (or in robots.txt) has any relation to distributing your content.

What else would they scrape your data for? Sure some could be for personal use but most of the time it will be to redistribute in a new medium. Like a recipe app importing recipes.

Indexing is what "scrapers" mostly do.

That's how search engines work. If you don't allow any scraping don't be surprised if you get no visitors.

Search engine scrapers index. But that's a subset of scrapers.

There are data scrapers and content scrapers, and these are becoming more prolific as AI takes off and ppl need to feed it data.

This post is specifically about AI scrapers.