AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt

Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.

Good old honeytrap. I'm not sure, but I think that it's doable.

Have a honeytrap page somewhere in your website. Make sure that legit users won't access it. Disallow crawling the honeytrap page through robots.txt.

Then if some crawler still accesses it, you could record+ban it as you said... or you could be even nastier and let it do so. Fill the honeytrap page with poison - nonsensical text that would look like something that humans would write.
- I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it's still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.
  
  Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.
  
  I'd love to see something similar with robots.
- Even better. Build a WordPress plugin to do this.
- I’m the idiot human that digs through robots.txt and the site map to see things that aren’t normally accessible by an end user.
"Help, my website no longer shows up in Google!"
Yeah, this is a pretty classic honeypot method. Basically make something available but inaccessible to the normal user. Then you know anyone who accesses it is not a normal user.

I’ve even seen this done with Steam achievements before; There was a hidden game achievement which was only available via hacking. So anyone who used hacks immediately outed themselves with a rare achievement that was visible on their profile.
- That’s a bit annoying as it means you can’t 100% the game as there will always be one achievement you can’t get.
- There are tools that just flag you as having gotten an achievement on Steam, you don't even have to have the game open to do it. I'd hardly call that 'hacking'.
Better yet, point the crawler to a massive text file of almost but not quite grammatically correct garbage to poison the model. Something it will recognize as language and internalize, but severely degrade the quality of its output.
- Maybe one of the lorem ipsum generators could help.
a bad-bot .htaccess trap.
robots.txt is purely textual; you can't run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn't intend to follow robots.txt wouldn't query it.
- If it doesn't get queried that's the fault of the webscraper. You don't need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:
  
  here-there-be-dragons.html
  
  Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn't pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.
- You're second point is a good one, but you absolutely can log the IP which requested robots.txt. That's just a standard part of any http server ever, no JavaScript needed.
- People not intending to follow it is the real reason not to bother, but it's trivial to track who downloaded the file and then hit something they were asked not to.
  
  Like, 10 minutes work to do right. You don't need js to do it at all.

As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that's why things seem so much worse now.

It's abuse, plain and simple.
Governments could do something about it, if they weren't overwhelmed by bullshit from bullshit generators instead and lead by people driven by their personal wealth.
these days

When, at any point in history, have people acknowledged that there was no social change or disruption and everyone was happy?

Well the trump era has shown that ignoring social contracts and straight up crime are only met with profit and slavish devotion from a huge community of dipshits. So. Y’know.

Only if you're already rich or in the right social circles though. Everyone else gets fined/jail time of course.
- Meh maybe. I know plenty of people who get away with all kinds of crap without money or connections.

The open and free web is long dead.

just thinking about robots.txt as a working solution to people that literally broker in people's entire digital lives for hundreds of billions of dollars is so ... quaint.

It's up there with Do-Not-Track.

Completely pointless because it's not enforced
- Do-Not-Track, AKA, "I've made my browser fingerprint more unique for you, please sell my data"
- I bet at least one site I've visited in my lifetime has enforced it
you're jaded. me, too. but you're jaded.
- i prefer "antiqued" but yes

I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.

if exists("/robots.txt"):
    no it fucking doesn't

Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don't waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It's there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.
Yeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It's one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.

Alternative title: Capitalism doesn't care about morals and contracts. It wants to make more money.

Exactly. Capitalism spits in the face of the concept of a social contract, especially if companies themselves didn't write it.
- Capitalism, at least, in a lassie-faire marketplace, operates on a social contract, fiat money is an example of this. The market decides, the people decide. Are there ways to amass a certain amount of money to make people turn blind eyes? For sure, but all systems have their ways to amass power, no matter what
Capitalism is a concept, it can't care if it wanted and it even can't want to begin with. It's the humans. You will find greedy, immoral ones in every system and they will make it miserable for everyone else.
- Capitalism is the widelly accepted self-serving justification of those people for their acts.
  
  The real problem is in the "widelly accepted" part: a sociopath killing an old lady and justifying it because "she looked funny at me" wouldn't be "widelly accepted" and Society would react in a suitable way, but if said sociopath scammed the old lady's pension fund because (and this is a typical justification in Investment Banking) "the opportunity was there and if I didn't do it somebody else would've, so better be me and get the profit", it's deemed "acceptable" and Society does not react in a suitable way.
  
  Mind you, Society (as in, most people) might actually want to react in a suitable way, but the structures in our society are such that the Official Power Of Force in our countries is controlled by a handful of people who got there with crafty marketing and backroom plays, and those deem it "acceptable".

Most every other social contract has been violated already. If they don't ignore robots.txt, what is left to violate?? Hmm??

It's almost as if leaving things to social contracts vs regulating them is bad for the layperson... 🤔

Nah fuck it. The market will regulate itself! Tax is theft and I don't want that raise or I'll get in a higher tax bracket and make less!
- This can actually be an issue for poor people, not because of tax brackets but because of income-based assistance cutoffs. If $1/hr raise throws you above those cutoffs, that extra $160 could cost you $500 in food assistance, $5-$10/day for school lunch, or get you kicked out of government subsidied housing.
  
  Yet another form of persecution that the poor actually suffer and the rich pretend to.
- God the number of people I’ve heard say this over the years is nuts.
- And then the companies hit the "trust thermocline", customers leave them in droves and companies wonder how this could've happened.
- I got it was sarcasm, but it's always good to add a /s just in case
- Yea, because authoritarianism is well known to be sooooo good for the layperson.

We need laws mandating respect of robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuff

It's a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt
AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That's what they're trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they'll get away with it.
you can't really make laws in the united states it's too hard
- The battle cry of conservatives everywhere: It's too hard!
  
  Except if it involves oppressing minorities and women. Then it's a moral imperative worth all the time and money you can shovel at it regardless of whether the desired outcome is realistic or not.
Turning that into a law is ridiculous - you really can’t consider that more than advisory unless you enforce it with technical means. For example, maybe put it behind a login or captcha if you want only humans to see it
- Are you aware of what "unlisted" means?
Sounds like the type of thing that would either be unenforceable or profitable to violate compared to the fines.
Why? What would you like to achieve and how would that help?
I hope not, laws tend to get outdated real fast. Who knows robots.txt might not even be used in the future and it just there adding space because of law reasons.
- You can describe the law in a similar way to a specification, and you can make it as broad as needed. Something like the file name shouldn't ever come up as an issue.
- robots.txt is a 30 year old standard. If we can write common sense laws around things like email and VoIP, we can do it for web standards too.
- robots.txt has been an unofficial standard for 30 years and its augmented with sitemap.xml to help index uncrawlable pages, and Schema.org to expose contents for Semantic Web. I'm not stating it shouldn't not be a law, but to suggest changing norms as a reason is a pretty weak counterargument, man.
- We don't need new laws we just need enforcement of existing laws. It is already illegal to copy copyrighted content, it's just that the AI companies do it anyway and no one does anything about it.
  
  Enforcing respect for robots.txt doesn't matter because the AI companies are already breaking the law.
All my scrapping scripts go to shit...please no, I need automation to live...

They didn't violate the social contact, they disrupted it.

True innovation. So brave.

TIL that robots.txt is a thing

what is it?
- robots.txt is a file available in a standard location on web servers (example.com/robots.txt) which set guidelines for how scrapers should behave.
  
  That can range from saying "don't bother indexing the login page" to "Googlebot go away".
  
  IT's also in the first paragraph of the article.
- Robots.txt is a file that is is accessible as part of an http request. It's a backend configuration file that sets rules for what automatically running web crawlers are allowed. It can set both who is and who isn't allowed. Google is usually the most widely allowed domain for bots just because their crawler is how they find websites for search results. But it's basically the honor system. You could write a scraper today that goes to websites that it is being told it doesn't have permission to view this page, ignore it, and still get the information
just wait until you hear about humans.txt, it really exitst here

I explicitly have my robots.txt set to block out AI crawlers, but I don't know if anyone else will observe the protocol. They should have tools I can submit a sitemap.xml against to know if i've been parsed. Until they bother to address this, I can only assume their intent is hostile and if anyone is serious about building a honeypot and exposing the tooling for us to deploy at large, my options are limited.

The funny (in an "wtf" not "haha" sense) thing is, individuals such as security researchers have been charged under digital trespassing laws for stuff like accessing publicly available ststems and changing a number in the URL in order to get access to data that normally wouldn't, even after doing responsible disclosure.

Meanwhile, companies completely ignore the standard mentions to say "you are not allowed to scape this data" and then use OUR content/data to build up THEIR datasets, including AI etc.

That's not a "violation of a social contract" in my book, that's violating the terms of service for the site and essentially infringement on copyright etc.

No consequences for them though. Shit is fucked.
- Remember Aaron Swartz
- Corporations are people except when it comes to liability. Compare the consequences of stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud vs. stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud as an LLC.
- Just thought of a nasty hack the browser makers (or hackers) could use to scrape unlisted sites - by surreptitiously logging user browser history for a crawl list

Strong "the constitution is a piece of paper" energy right there

hmm, i though websites just blocked crawler traffic directly? I know one site in particular has rules about it, and will even go so far as to ban you permanently if you continually ignore them.

You cannot simply block crawlers lol
- hide a link no one would ever click. if an ip requests the link, it's a ban
- Well you can if you know the IPs that come in from but that's of course the trick.
- last i checked humans dont access every page on a website nearly simultaneously...
  
  And if you imitate a human then honestly who cares.
Detecting crawlers can be easier said than done 🙁
- i mean yeah, but at a certain point you just have to accept that it's going to be crawled. The obviously negligent ones are easy to block.
There are more crawlers than I have fucks to give, you'll be in a pissing match forever. robots.txt was supposed to be the norm to tell crawlers what they can and cannot access. Its not on you to block them. Its on them, and its sadly a legislative issues at this point.

I wish it wasn't, but legislative fixes are always the most robust and complied against.
- yes but also there's a point where it's blatantly obvious. And i can't imagine it's hard to get rid of the obviously offending ones. Respectful crawlers are going to be imitating humans, so who cares, disrespectful crawlers will ddos your site, that can't be that hard to implement.
  
  Though if we're talking "hey please dont scrape this particular data" Yeah nobody was ever respecting that lol.

What social contract? When sites regularly have a robots.txt that says "only Google may crawl", and are effectively helping enforce a monolopy, that's not a social contract I'd ever agree to.

I had a one-eared rabbit. He was a monolopy.
- Sounds like a Pal name lol
When sites regularly have a robots.txt that says “only Google may crawl”

Is that actually true?

If so, why would they do that?

No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.

¿Por qué no los dos?
- Fhdj glgllf d''''''×÷π•=|¶ fkssb
Why not blame the companies ? After all they are the ones that are doing it, not the boomer politicians.

And in the long term they are the ones that risk to be "punished", just imagine people getting tired of this shit and starting to block them at a firewall level...
- Because the politicians also created the precedent that anything you can get away with, goes. They made the game, defined the objective, and then didn’t adapt quickly so that they and their friends would have a shot at cheating.
  
  There is absolutely no narrative of “what can you do for your country” anymore. It’s been replaced by the mottos of “every man for himself” and “get while the getting’s good”.
I think that good behavior is implicitly mandated even if there's nobody to punish you if you don't.
- Lol

This is a very interesting read. It is very rarely people on the internet agree to follow 1 thing without being forced

Loads of crawlers don't follow it, i'm not quite sure why AI companies not following it is anything special. Really it's just to stop Google indexing random internal pages that mess with your SEO.

It barely even works for all search providers.
- The Internet Archive does not make a useful villain and it doesn't have money, anyway. There's no reason to fight that battle and it's harder to win.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you hosted your website on your computer, as many people did, or on hastily constructed server software run through your home internet connection, all it took was a few robots overzealously downloading your pages for things to break and the phone bill to spike.

AI companies like OpenAI are crawling the web in order to train large language models that could once again fundamentally change the way we access and share information.

In the last year or so, the rise of AI products like ChatGPT, and the large language models underlying them, have made high-quality training data one of the internet’s most valuable commodities.

You might build a totally innocent one to crawl around and make sure all your on-page links still lead to other live pages; you might send a much sketchier one around the web harvesting every email address or phone number you can find.

The New York Times blocked GPTBot as well, months before launching a suit against OpenAI alleging that OpenAI’s models “were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more.” A study by Ben Welsh, the news applications editor at Reuters, found that 606 of 1,156 surveyed publishers had blocked GPTBot in their robots.txt file.

“We recognize that existing web publisher controls were developed before new AI and research use cases,” Google’s VP of trust Danielle Romain wrote last year.

The original article contains 2,912 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

sigh. Of course they are ...

Wow I'm shocked! Just like how OpenAI preached for "privacy and ethics" and went deafly silent on data hoarding and scraping, then privatizes their stolen scraped data. If they insist their data collection to be private, then it needs regular external audits by strict data privacy firms just like they do with security.

Also, by the way, violating a basic social contract to not work towards triggering an intelligence explosion that will likely replace all biological life on Earth with computronium, but who’s counting? :)

If it makes you feel any better, my bet is still on nuclear holocaust or complete ecological collapse resulting from global warming to be our undoing. Given a choice, I’d prefer nuclear holocaust. Feels less protracted. Worst option is weaponized microbes or antibiotic resistant bacteria. That’ll take foreeeever.
- 100%. Autopoietic computronium would be a “best case” outcome, if Earth is lucky! More likely we don’t even get that before something fizzles. “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” is a good paper to read.
I don't think glorified predictive text is posing any real danger to all life on Earth.
- Until we weave consciousness with machines we should be good.
That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called "AI" today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don't worry, we're not heading for the singularity.
- I request sources :)
I remember early Zuckerberg comments that put me onto just how douchey corporations could be about exploiting a new resource.
Ah, AI doesn't pose as danger in that way. It's danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.
- All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It's just natural.
  
  But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It's a great tool to add to professionals' arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they'd have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)
- Those are dangers of capitalism, not AI.
- Seems relevant.
  
  https://www.notebookcheck.net/UPS-lays-off-12-000-managers-as-AI-replaces-jobs.802229.0.html
- Your worry at least has possible solutions, such as a global VAT funding UBI.

good. robots.txt was always a bad idea

Like so many terrible ideas, it worked flawlessly for generations

Why should I care about a text file lol

All laws are just words on peices of paper. Why should you care?
- This seems to interestingly prove the point made by the person this is in reply to. Breaking laws come with consequences. Not caring about a robots.txt file doesn't. But maybe it should.
A config* file 😉

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 "robots.txt is a social contract" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤡

If you have something to say, actually explain it instead of the obnoxious emoji spam.
- It's completely off-topic, but you know 4chan filters? Like, replacing "fam" with "senpai" and stuff like this?
  
  So. It would be damn great if Lemmy had something similar. Except that it would replace emojis, "lol" and "lmao" with "I'm braindead."
A lot of post-September 1993 internet users wouldn't understand, I get it.
- post-September 1993
  
  you're talking nonsense, for all I know today is Wed 11124 set 1993
I've just converted to polytheism and have begun praying to the Emoji God asking them to use 1,000 origami cry laughing Emojis to smite you down, so that you may die how you lived.

I hope it won't be quick, or painless, but that's up to the Gods now.
- I hope it won’t be quick, or painless, but that’s up to the Gods now.
  
  Considering that we're talking about emojis, it'll definitely be silent.