Comment by jsheard 2 days ago
This is a really bad take, it's not like this server is hacking clients which connect to it. It's providing perfectly valid HTTP responses that just happen to be slow and full of markov gibberish, any harm which comes of that is self inflicted by assuming that websites must provide valuable data as a matter of course.
If AI companies want to sue webmasters for that then by all means, they can waste their money and get laughed out of court.
I guess it's an unpopular take but I don't see why it was flagged. It's a good point of discussion.
> If you want to protect your content, use the technical mechanisms that are available,
> You can choose to gatekeep your content, and by doing so, make it unscrapeable, and legally protected.
so... robots.txt, which the AI parasites ignore?
> Also, consider that relatively small, cheap llms are able to parse the difference between meaningful content and Markovian jabber such as this software produces.
okay, so it's not damaging, and there you've refuted your entire argument
> No, put up a loginwall or paywall, authenticate users, and go private.
We know for a fact that AI companies don't respect that, if they want data that's behind a paywall then they'll jump through hoops to take it anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/10/mark-zuck...
If they don't have to abide by "norms" then we don't have to for their sake. Fuck 'em.
He's not interfering with any normal operation of any system. He is offering links. You can follow them or not, entirely at your own discretion. Those links load slowly. You can wait for them to complete or not, entirely at your own discretion.
The crawler's normal operation is not interfered with in any way: the crawler does exactly what it's programmed to do. If its programmers decided it should exhaustively follow links, he's not preventing it from doing that operation.
Legally, at best you'd be looking to warp the concept of attractive nuisance to apply to a crawler. As that legal concept is generally intended to prevent bodily harm to children, however, good luck.
yea, it comes across as an extremely entitled mobster take.
heads i win, tails you lose. we own all your content, and you better behave.
i can bet this is incentive-speak.