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

> "Creative expression" is not finite

It absolutely is.

Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places.

Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency.

As with any issue of scarcity, economics comes in. If you want this activity supported, one good way of doing it is enabling the investment of time. Copyright does this by giving people an economic/legal claim on how copies of their work are distributed.

Paying for copies has the usual market merits -- the economic reward and signals of value are proportional to copies acquired. There are other ways of course, common ones brought up here are patronage and merchandising, but they lose the market merits, and both are basically another way of saying "nobody should have to pay for the value in your work directly," and merchandising is even worse in that it's basically saying "yeah, you'll just need another job to support yourself while you're doing this thing", which is time taken away from investment in the creative endeavor, so you'll get less of the actual endeavor.

What works? This is an idea, not anything that's been throughly tried.

> The thing I somewhat struggle with is that after 20-30 years of calls for shorter copyright terms, lesser restrictions on content you access publicly, and what you can do with it, we are now in the situation where the arguments are quickly leaning the other way.

There've always been solid human arguments for sustaining copyright legally. The balance is the tricky part.

On one hand we had a period where terms got too long, and some of the really aggressive legal enforcement from 20 years ago before stakeholders actually figured out how to get into digital markets were was entitled and useless. The pendulum also swung the other way with things like buffet streaming services essentially offering an economic bargain for creators with a sliver of compensatory difference from piracy but with none of piracy's actual benefits (people who simply pirate know they're not participating in a relationship of economic support with creators and might be persuaded to, someone who uses Spotify is under the illusion there's something fully legit on that front).

But the fundamental copyright bargain -- creators can recoup investments of time and effort in proportion to how popular engagement with their work is -- has always made sense.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration...

Both these things can be true:

(1) Using a work as training data for AI is a very novel use, it's entirely plausible there should be novel considerations and rights to go with it.

(2) The incentive & benefits of copyrights have diminishing returns the longer the horizons are, while the cost in terms of social inaccessibility only increase. Where that's balanced out precisely is a debatable question, but something longer than a human lifespan is probably on the wrong side.

Robots.txt is where you tell crawlers (AI or otherwise) what should and shouldn't be read on your site.

Metadata like in tags, HTML meta tags, etc. is where you describe the content so meaning can be extracted from it by machines and automated processing.

I do think that robots.txt is pretty useful. If I want my content indexed, I can help the engine find my content. If indexing my content is counterproductive, then I can ask that it be skipped. So it helps the align my interests with the search engine; I can expose my content or I can help the engine avoid wasting resources indexing something that I don't want it to see.

It would also be useful to distinguish training crawlers from indexing crawlers. Maybe I'm publishing personal content. It's useful for me to have it indexed for search, but I don't want an AI to be able to simulate me or my style.