[superkuh]

I've noticed Anthropic bots in my logs for more than a year now and I welcome them. I'd love for their LLM to be better at what I'm interested in. I run my website off my home connection on a desktop computer and I've never had a problem. I'm not saying my dozens of run-ins with the anthropic bots (there have been 3 variations I've seen so far) are totally representative, but they've been respecting my robots.txt.

They even respect extended robots.txt features like,

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /library/*.pdf$

I make my websites for other people to see. They are not secrets I hoard who's value goes away when copied. The more copies and derivations the better.

I guess ideas like creative commons and sharing go away when the smell of money enters the water. Better lock all your text behind paywalls so the evil corporations won't get it. Just be aware, for every incorporated entity you block you're blocking just as many humans with false positives, if not more. This anti-"scraping" hysteria is mostly profit motivated.

[JohnFen]

> This anti-"scraping" hysteria is mostly profit motivated.

That seems overly reductive.

First, it sounds like you're insinuating that the people claiming the bots are causing actual disruption to their operations are lying. If that's your intent, some amount of evidence for that would be welcome.

Second, lots of people don't want their content to be used to train these models for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with money. Trying to avoid contributing to the training of these models is not the equivalent of rejecting the idea of the free exchange of information.

[superkuh]

>That seems overly reductive.

I qualified my statement but you've chosen to ignore that. I've been paying attention to the Anthropic bots closely for a (relatively) long time and this mastodon group's problems come as a surprise to me based off that lived experience. I don't doubt the truth of their claims. I looked at https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/112/877/47... and I see the bandwidth used. But like I said,

>I'm not saying my dozens of run-ins with the anthropic bots (there have been 3 variations I've seen so far) are totally representative,

My take here is that their one limited experience also isn't representative and others are projecting it on to the entire project due to a shifting cultural perception that "scraping" is something weird and bad to be stopped. But it's not. If it were me I'd be checking my webserver config to be sure robots.txt is actually being violated. And I'd check my set per user-agent bandwidth limits in nginx to make sure they matched. That'd solve it. I'm sure the mastodon software has better solutions even if they haven't solved their own DDoS generating problem since 2017 (ref: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486)

[JohnFen]

> their one limited experience

Their report is just the latest in a string from different entities. It's not just one limited experience.

[superkuh]

Ah, thanks, I could only read the main/single mastodon post properly since mastodon v4 is javascript only and I was reading the HTML source meta-content field. This does not show replies or linked postings.