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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”

#81

Post by Spivak »

casey2 wrote: post #60
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

Disney has a monopoly on media because they still have the copyright to their IP from the 20s? LOL! Companies that can leverage this new wave of AI will have, in reality, 1000x the advantage that you believe Disney has.

The argument goes that copyright has allowed massive corporations to buy up and exert near total control over all of our shared stories. And when you own the cultural touchstones of whole generations that gives you power that no one else can ever wield.

There is a massive amount of amazing stories based on ancient myths because it's one of the few large corpora that isn't copywritten. Once you see it in media you can't unsee it. The only space where that kind of creativity can thrive anymore is fan-fiction which lives in weird limbo where it's illegal but the copyright owners don't care. And when you want to bring any of it to the mainstream you have to hide it, all of Ali Hazelwoods books are reworked fanfics because she can't use the actual characters that inspired her -- her most famous book "The Love Hypothesis" is a Reylo fic.

Go check out https://archiveofourown.org/media and see how many works are owned by a few large corporations.

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

#82

Post by techaqua »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #54

Your HTML already has semantic meta elements like author and description you should be populating with info like that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Introduc...

and also opengraph meta tags https://ogp.me/

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

#83

Post by soperj »

safety1st wrote: post #56
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…

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

I think they nailed it with the original 1790 act. 14 years + 14 more is plenty.

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

#86

Post by vlunkr »

brookst wrote: post #14
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…

> Robots.txt has failed as a system, if it hadn't we wouldn't have captchas or Cloudflare. Failing to solve every problem does not mean a solution is a failure. From sunscreen to seatbelts, the world is full of great solutions that occasionally fail due to statistics and large numbers.

I know it's getting pedantic, but sunscreen and seatbelts are a poor analogy. They do offer protection if you use them. robots.txt only offers protection if other people/robots choose to care about them.

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

#87

Post by samwillis »

safety1st wrote: post #56
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…

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

My phrasing was absolutely not meant to be read as myself speaking for all, apologies, I certainly don't want to offend.

It has felt on HN and elsewhere that the prevailing attitude to copyright has been these two, somewhat contradictory, things. That's what I was trying to highlight with my phrasing of "we", which was also not meant to include myself but be a nod to the way a vocal group try to steer and dominate the conversion.

Both debates are important to have, I don't know the answers.

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

#88

Post by zerotolerance »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #71

If AI is using training data from your site, presumably it got that data by crawling it. So either it's already respecting robots.txt, in which case ai.txt would be redundant, or it's ignoring it, in which case there's no reason to expect it would respect ai.txt any more than it did robots.txt.

robots.txt is about crawling, ai.txt would assumably be either augmentative metadata or specific copyright terms of use with respect to AI uses.

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

#89

Post by circuit10 »

IanCal wrote: post #50
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…

The poster wants the opposite - a way of explicitly helping AI systems/etc to use their site. If people ignore it, they're just giving up a bit of help.

Yes, I feel like this person only read the title and not the text of the post and made an assumption
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