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

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

#61

Post by mrighele »

I would prefer a more generic "license.txt" i.e. a standard sanctioned way of telling the User Agent that the resource under a certain location is provided with a specific license. Maybe a picture is public domain, maybe is copyrighted but freely distributable, or maybe it is but you cannot train AI on it. Same for code, text, articles etc. The difficult part would be to make it formal enough so that it can easily consumed by robots.

With the current situation you either assume that everything is not usable, or you just not care and crawl everything that you can reach.

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

#62

Post by Retric »

samwillis wrote: post #6

Using robots.txt as a model for anything doesn't work. All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative. Robots.txt has failed as a system, if it hadn't we wouldn't have captchas or Cloudflare. In the age of AI we need to better understand where copyright applies to it, and potentially need reform of copyright to ali…

That’s factually incorrect. Germany for example does explicitly give machine readable permissions like robots.txt legal weight.

In general without a fair use exemption or permission from robots.txt saving a copy of a website’s content to your own servers is copyright infringement.

Purely factual information like Amazon’s prices isn’t protected by copyright, but if you want to save artwork or source files to train AI, that’s a copyright issue even before you get into the possibility of your AI being considered a derivative work.

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

#63

Post by kriro »

I'm curious what the legal ramifications of adding "this code is not to be used for any ML algorithms, failure to adhere to this will result in a fine of at least one million dollars" (in smarter writing) to a software license would be. Seems like a dumb idea/not enforcable but maybe someone with software licensing knowledge can chime in.

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

#69

Post by tensor »

throw9away6 wrote: post #67

Why would anyone want ai to train on and monetize your content? If there was a way to block ai stealing content most people would opt to block it.

And then your site would not be indexed by any search engine. Good luck with that.
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