The internet kind of sucks right now
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If I'm going to share my information and knowledge publicly on an Internet site, I'd like everyone to have fair and open access to it, not at the whims of a multinational corp to gatekeep for me. So the fact that AI can access it too doesn't discourage me.
You have information from me because I choose to share it, not because a site has demanded I give it up without a clear benefit to me in return.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think there's a lot of solid arguments against letting AI steal everything, but with the scraping there's an even more immediate problem. They don't rate limit or do it in an intelligent method. It becomes a full blown ddos that has take down entire sites and slowed many more to the point of near uselessness.
They're in a very literal sense crashing large chunks of the Internet and causing havoc which costs very real money to fix, either by upping server resources or installing AI scraping mitigation resources so that every still has access to the free information you mention.
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(IANAL) Wouldn't this count as fair use since the AI sex bot is only using snippets?
That's currently being argued in the courts. There's a lot that goes into it from right to distribution, to proving that although the AI bot can't reproduce everything even though it normally doesn't.
[https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3-1-can-recall-42-percent-of-the-first-harry-potter-book/](A very real example of reproducibility)There's also arguments about how they accessed large amounts of content. The law doesn't just recognize whether you can access something or not, but what you access it for. There's laws about accessing things with the sole purpose of using it to develop a commercial product. All of it is a tangled mess that there's no current clear answer to (legally, morally I think there is but that's very opinionated)
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Depends on the forum, plenty of echo chambers out there...
A lot of the forums I'm seeing talked about where more technical or objective kinds. Like in a car forum there'd be repair manuals or parts lists, fountain pen forums would have loads of images comparing inks side by side for different shades and hues. Those are the sorts of knowledge centers being discussed and reminisced about a lot here.
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I think there's a lot of solid arguments against letting AI steal everything, but with the scraping there's an even more immediate problem. They don't rate limit or do it in an intelligent method. It becomes a full blown ddos that has take down entire sites and slowed many more to the point of near uselessness.
They're in a very literal sense crashing large chunks of the Internet and causing havoc which costs very real money to fix, either by upping server resources or installing AI scraping mitigation resources so that every still has access to the free information you mention.
That is definitely a problem that needs to be dealt with, since AI scrapers hogging bandwidth or making sites inaccessible means it is hampering equal access to everyone. Ignoring conventions and not rate limiting itself are harmful to the open internet.
So yes, those kinds of AI scraping behaviours should be mitigated, but on the principle of AI ingesting my public data, I'm not against it, if it can access it reasonably and fairly like anyone else.
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Then search engines wouldn't find anything from the forum either.
True... But what if the forum had its own search engine that could ignore the anti-scraping stuff? The issue would be making a good search engine lol
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Is that what we're up against? I thought every time I voice my mind on forums it gets upvoted or downvoted or ignored, but always ultimately ignored
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What is making you stink discord isn't also selling all its data to AI companies?
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Lol I knew this one year ago
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People these days dont realise that confidently incorrect people pre-exist facebook.
It's different though.
If you were a flat earther in 1982, you probably would have a weird self published "newspaper" by someone 4 times a year, and two or three books and no platform beyond literally shouting on the street at people who all considered you a moron.
Nowadays, if you're a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas. They will also drag you along by pure crank magnetism into other bullshit. You can spread your bullshit far and wide, and since people are automatically served with similar content, you're even likely to find other idiots like you "in the wild", which is actually an algorithmic bubble.
Before, nobody you met in real life would agree with you. Nowadays, everyone you "meet" online agrees with you.
So yes, confidently incorrect people have always been there, but not in these numbers, and rarely to this level of confidence. That's why people react to vehemently, they rarely ever reach outside their bubble. Your ideas that the world is round aren't the general concept to them, they hear from flat earthers every single hour of the day.
Nowadays, if you're a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas.
And because crackpots like this are very engaged in their crackpottery, it's a great place to put ads. That means that the big Internet ad companies all want to be the ones to host those bullshit ideas.
Back in the day, the reason crackpot newspapers had to be self-published is that the big publishers didn't want to have anything to do with the crackpots. But, in the modern world, Google / Meta can find someone who wants to run an add to your crackpottery, so you get the same treatment as a big media publisher. In fact, you might get better treatment because crackpottery may be stickier than say the Boston Globe, so Google / Meta might prefer to work with you because it allows them to show more ads.
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But they Index everything.
Just request your data and you’ll get a neat package of all your messages with timestamps and all.They store your data, they don't correlate your data.
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They store your data, they don't correlate your data.
So what? You can still sell it to AI companies without assigning an user to each message. They don't care about who wrote it when stealing the content.
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Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet -- there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)
It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it's not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.
And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.
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I don't have children. My legacy is running 37 Quora accounts that each answer niche questions very incorrectly, over and over.
The hero we don't deserve
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37?
In a row?
Love a good Clerks reference
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Is that what we're up against? I thought every time I voice my mind on forums it gets upvoted or downvoted or ignored, but always ultimately ignored
️.resists overwhming urge to ignore
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The forum I call home tolerates a lot of hate speech.
I think I'm out, but it's less about the AI scraping and more about moderation.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I don't even oppose hate speech at this point as long as its directed towards people who believe in the project 2025 agenda instead of the other way around (which it almost exclusively always is)
we need a kiwi farms but for targeting delusional conservatives. The enemy got to where they are today partly due to mass internet trolling and letting them trample the internet unopposed leaves weak-minded normies to adopt and fight for their views. "being nice" about it ain't getting anybody anywhere and its time for these pieces of shit to actually experience bullying for themselves.Too bad no such communities exist on the internet.
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What stops any domain host from selling us out tomorrow? Why single out cloudflare?
IDK what you mean by "domain host" but the thing about cloudflare ('s most prominent service) is that it's essentially a voluntary MITM between you and your clients. They see ALL traffic going between your server and your clients. This is not normal. Normally traffic between server and client is encrypted with HTTPS. By using cloudflare's proxy your are adding a backdoor to that encryption. Your registrar cannot normally see this traffic. Your certificate authority cannot normally see this traffic without issuing a malicious cert. But cloudflare can. And, if they wanted to, they could even inject malware to deanonymize users, spy on journalists, steal data, etc. As a matter of fact, they already do, but instead of calling it "malware" they call it "analytics", so it's okay
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What if we made it so that the text that any use posts in the forum website has a bunch of nonsense letters mixed in between the letters they posted, but they're all set to a REALLY small font or even taking no space thanks to those special characters, and colored in such a way to make them disappear into the background? That way when a person reads it makes sense but when a scraper gets it it'll just be a jumbled useless mess!
People who use screen readers (like blind people) would be screwed. I like where your head is at, though!
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People who use screen readers (like blind people) would be screwed. I like where your head is at, though!
Built-in screen reader with a page designed for those who are hard of sight (is that the name?) with stuff like tab navigation that is actually useful, unlike most websites today! But yeah this "solution" is very hard to implement because it has a lot of things it'll cause issues to that will need individual fixes for, thanks AI and scrapers!! Making the internet a hellhole sure is great!
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Am I the only person who doesn't care if people 'scrape' my 'knowledge?'
That's the whole point of putting something online. So anyone can look at it. I'm not about to get petty about who has access and who doesn't.
No, you are not.
I also give 0 fucks about intellectual property.People with their modern conveniences have it so well, they just make shit up to be upset about.
