Comment by 23B1

16 hours ago

HN when it's a photographer, writer, or artist concerned about IP laundering: "Fair use! Information wants to be free!"

HN when it's bots hammering some guy's server "Hey this is wrong!"

A lot of you are unfamiliar with the tragedy of the commons. I have seen the paperclip maximizer – and he is you lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

14 comments

23B1

Reply
navanchauhan  16 hours ago

I think there’s a difference between crawling websites at a reasonable pace instead of just hammering the server to the point it’s unusable.

Nobody has problems with the Google Search indexer trying to crawl websites in a responsible way

  • 23B1  16 hours ago

    For sure.

    I'm really just pointing out the inconsistent technocrat attitude towards labor, sovereignty, and resources.

flir  15 hours ago

Personally I'm not trying to block the bots, I'm trying to avoid the bandwidth bill.

I've recently blocked everything that isn't offering a user agent. If it had only pulled text I probably wouldn't have cared, but it was pulling images as well (bot designers, take note - you can have orders of magnitude less impact if you skip the images).

For me personally, what's left isn't eating enough bandwidth for me to care, and I think any attempt to serve some bots is doomed to failure.

If I really, really hated chatbots (I don't), I'd look at approaches that poison the well.

Analemma_  16 hours ago

Most of those of those artists aren’t any better though. I’m on a couple artists’ forums and outlets like Tumblr, and I saw firsthand the immediate, total 180 re: IP protection when genAI showed up. Overnight, everybody went from “copying isn’t theft, it leaves the original!” and other such mantras, to being die-hard IP maximalists. To say nothing of how they went from “anything can be art and it doesn’t matter what tools you’re using” to forming witch-hunt mobs against people suspected of using AI tooling. AI has made a hypocrite out of everybody.

  • 23B1  16 hours ago

    Manga nerds on Tumblr aren't the artists I'm worried about. I'm talking about people whose intellectual labor is being laundered by gigacorps and the inane defenses mounted by their techbro serfdom.