How worried should we be - FB/IG scrapping for AI

Mimi Simon

@Arkania Bluesky doesn't have huge numbers of users (yet) but its certainly not a platform for artists/portfolios. It's actually a twitter alternative and has a growing kidlit community. I haven't had an account for long but i've already been followed by a few random non artists who just came across my posts. I hope Bluesky survives and grows because i think it's a great platform.

danielerossi

The bigger picture I see is there’s nothing stopping anyone else from posting our artwork on any platform that trains AI. And I don’t mean impostors. For instance, many people have shared my posts or posted their own photos of tshirts and books I’ve designed with my cartoon characters on them.

I also have a website with all my comics. I’m sure by now Google or any number of other platforms had already scrapped the heck out of it before I even heard of generative AI.

I really hate the unethical practices and self-entitlement of tech companies trying to make big bucks from scraping our art for their AI venture while pushing us into a corner.

Mimi Simon

@danielerossi I'm trying to figure out how to block Ai crawlers from my own website at least. That at least should be doable I think.

Enni Heikura

Hi, I'd like to confirm if my future Instagram posts will be safe from AI usage. I submitted a form to Meta through Instagram, stating that I do not want my images used for AI development since I am based in Europe. I received a quick response saying that my request is justified and will be followed in the future. Can I trust this, or should I ensure further protection by using Glaze or Nightshade?

Katt

@Mimi-Simon are you saying that whatever it being used to train the AI model is also going on personal websites and portfolios?

@Katt how did you build your website? Did you code it yourself or did you use a website builder platform?

Mimi Simon

@Katt Yes absolutely! I mean it's more likely to go on websites of famous artists but no reason not to be too carful. Heres what I found out to do:
create a new file in your websites files named "robots.txt" and put this text in it.

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

this will tell AI crawlers I don't want them there and they should go elsewhere. Some crawlers are designed to override this stuff but others are designed to obey. I included Chat GPT's crawler and Google ai crawler and a generic crawler. I couldn't find out the names of any others for example like Midjourney's crawler. If i find out more I'll add them.

Mimi Simon

Ok I did some more research and found a list people have been compiling of all ai crawlers they've been able to discover. feel free to use this list and start blocking away.

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/blob/main/robots.txt

Katt

This post is deleted!

Katt

@Mimi-Simon I will keep that in mind, thank you

Katt

@thomas-young I used Wix, and bought a domain name to connect to it.

@Katt here is some information I found on protecting your Wix website:

Wix:
• SEO Tools: Wix provides built-in SEO tools where you can manage robots.txt and meta tags.
• CAPTCHA: Wix Forms includes options to add CAPTCHA to prevent automated submissions.
• Security: Wix includes built-in security features and monitoring to help protect your site from malicious bots.

Wix:

1.	robots.txt:
•	Go to the SEO settings in your site dashboard.
•	Customize the robots.txt file as needed.
2.	Meta Tags:
•	In the SEO settings, add meta tags to the header section of your pages.
3.	CAPTCHA:
•	When editing a form, go to the Form Settings.
•	Enable CAPTCHA to protect the form from spam.

Katt

@thomas-young thank you! i will keep this in mind when I get my site back up. How do you all know this stuff? Please tell me you looked it up and didn't know it already
I tried to learn coding for about 2 seconds a couple years ago and was like "nope". lol.