Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

It will work exactly as well as robots.txt and the do not track flag.

Attempts to muster and legitimize the ownership, squandering and sequestration of The Commons are growing rampant after the recent successes of generative AI. They are a tragic and misguided attempt to lesion, fragment and own the very consistency of The Collective Mind. Individuals and groups already have fairly absolute authority over their information property -- simply choose not to release it to The Commons. If you do not want people to see, sit or sleep on your couch, please keep it locked inside your home.

Why are we so defensive concerning human created content vs robot created content? Do we really need to feel frightened by some gpt?

Whilst the output of AI is astonishing by itself, is it really creating meaningful content en masse? I see myself relying more and more on human-curated content because typical commercialized use cases of AI generated stuff (product descriptions, corp blogs, SEO landing pages, etc.) all read like meaningless blabber, to me at least.

Whenever I see some cool techbro boasting how he created his "SEO factory" using ChatGPT, I can't help but think that the poor guy is shitting where he eats without even realizing it. Take Google with their Search and Ads; over the last decade they managed to bring down overall quality of web content that much, that I'm just completely fed up using it because by 99% chance I'll land on some meaningless SEO page.

From what I can perceive with things like HN, Mastodon, etc. it feels more like a rejuvenation of the human centric brand trusted Web. And by that I mean: Dear crawler, just use my content. Maybe you can do something good with it, maybe not. But chances are low, it's gonna replace me in any way but rather improve my content. It only leads to a downward spiral if we stick with the past of commercial thinking (more cheap content, more followers, more ads); if we'd instead switch to subscription models individuals won't get rich but we'd have a great ecosystem of ideas and content again.

It's not actually contradictory at all when you consider the root of the issue is about power asymmetry between individual creators and the corporations. Copyright terms were lobbied for, and primarily benefit the large corporations. They're symbolic of corporate overreach, that's why they're unpopular.

Meanwhile, now that the laws are inconvenient for them, tech companies are straight up ignoring labeling their training data to respect IP law. Labeling the data would be expensive, thereby eroding profits. The loss of usable data would also harm the efficacy of their models, and the time spent classifying the data will hamper their iteration time.

The ideas are only dissonant if you are looking at the trees (copyright term, DMCA, right to repair, etc.) and not the forest: which is a class struggle between a few thousand billionaires versus the rest of humanity.

Circular reasoning. If you assume your ideas are your own, and nobody else can benefit from them without your permission, then the point of your rhetorical questions follows. The reality is that IP laws are a grafting of property-like attributes onto something that absolutely isn't property.

Do I feel I should have control over what I create? I make hammers for a living. I sell them for $10. I don't expect any control over what people do with "my" hammers once I sell them. I don't even expect to stop my neighbor from buying one, teaching herself to build hammers, and then manufacturing and selling identical ones for $9. Do you?

(To anticipate the rest of this tired conversation, the temporary monopoly tradeoff ("securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") is facially reasonable. But it's important to recognize that the "shouldn't" and "feel" in your questions are based on a very recent recharacterization of these temporary monopolies as "intellectual property," which is probably the most financially successful propaganda term ever devised. Start with "temporary monopoly" instead, and then the better rhetorical question for you to be asking is "when should Disney's temporary monopoly end?")