| > I might want to publish my thoughts, but I don't want people to be able to use that information, so I could have a humans.txt that forbids people from learning or remembering anything they read. I lean anti-copyright, so I am fairly sympathetic to your point of view. But that sympathy comes from a general distrust of copyright and access restrictions in general, not out of a concern over the philosophical differences between AI and human creativity. So I will point out that quite literally every single argument around "well a human could do it, so why can't a computer" can also be used to argue against having a robots.txt standard. Logging into HN, I had to fill out a captcha. Which... why, should we now have standards about when during the day humans are allowed to log in? Should I be able to have a text file that tells humans to make sure they only browse the site a few hours a day? Should I be able to have publicly available HTTP pages that follow a public standard that tell humans that they're not allowed to read my information? There's nothing philosophically special about a human vs a robot logging into HN. The robot is just doing the same thing that I do; it just does it faster, and why should that make a difference? /s But scale/practical effects matter, and if I were to jump onto Hackernews and argue that human beings have a right to automate their website access (something I have actually argued on HN before[0]), I would instantly be jumped on by like 10 different people telling me that I was naive and sure in theory humans have the right to automate but in practice malicious/poorly-coded bots are destroying servers and abusing public access. I'd be told how I was letting ideals blind me to reality, and how the modern web just couldn't exist if we didn't have the power to ban bots. And honestly, those are not unreasonable arguments. What is different about AI? In the tech industry we have (for better or worse) generally accepted that it's not that unreasonable for websites to dictate that their content and features are for humans only. Maybe it was a mistake for us to accept that, but I don't see why AI should get a pass when the majority of this community is generally hostile to every other kind of software automation when it's performed against unwilling targets. I don't see how the people who are upset about their content being scraped for a training model designed to put them out of business are any more unreasonable than the people who are upset about their content being scraped by Selenium, or who are mad that allowing search indexing means their website gets hammered with extra requests that just cost them money and don't see ads. The practical effects are very similar, and saying that technically philosophically the automated requests are doing the same things that humans do means very little in either discussion. ---- [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-delegate |