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How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for LLMs?

Hi I am a blogger working on a small niche . I have written all these articles from the ground up with considerable effort. I don't want this to end up just as a free training data set for LLMs. Is there anything I can do to prevent that and still keep my site open free for visitors?
( 63 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by throwaway888abc on Monday April 10, 2023 @09:07PM (#35519385)
For ChatGPT you can block it as per https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/bot

For others, take same measures as unwanted traffic or scrapping.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by gtirloni on Monday April 10, 2023 @10:39PM (#35520088)
Those instructions seem to be for plugins, not scraping training data.

In any case, OpenAI should inspect every website's terms of use before ingesting it in their training data. They shouldn't be exempted from this work. We shouldn't have to conform to their methods, there are laws and systems in place for that. Expensive, yes.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by villgax on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:58AM (#35521756)
It should be take permission first instead of this obscenity
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by welshwelsh on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:19AM (#35521894)
No way. I want my AI trained on everything, not just pages that "opted in." If you don't want AI learning from your work, then don't publish it.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by rantallion on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:29AM (#35521956)
If we were talking about free, open-source AIs available to everyone (ironically, what OpenAI set out to become), I'd be inclined to agree with you. However, we're talking about commercialised AIs that scrape your intellectual property and turn it into a money printing machine without paying you a dime.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by drstewart on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:16PM (#35530908)
Agree, search engines should be banned.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by nicbou on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:10AM (#35522999)
I'm publishing my work for humans to solve problems, not for AI startups to profit from.

If you want to use my work, credit me.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by latexr on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:40AM (#35523221)
That is profoundly egoistical. Your personal wants do not trample over the wants and rights of everyone else.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by lm28469 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:24AM (#35524191)
> I want my AI trained on everything

"your" AI ?

> If you don't want AI learning from your work, then don't publish it.

If you don't want me stealing and reusing your licensed open source code don't make it public

If you don't want me to steal your car don't park it on public roads

See how dumb that is ?

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by DANmode on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:56PM (#35530607)
> If you don't want me stealing and reusing your licensed open source code don't make it public

A practical matter, larger point completely aside: a nonzero number of individuals and corps will indeed use licensed code internally if they come across it and they feel it helps their goals.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ipaddr on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:50PM (#35532757)
Oracle and Microsoft will send you a million dollar bill if you tried that with their products. You would be surprised by who rats out a company for a reward
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by villgax on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:45AM (#35526801)
You probably think bandwidth costs are something you can squeeze out of thin air....
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by uberman on Monday April 10, 2023 @08:55PM (#35519317)
I think there is a noai meta tag
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by kleene_op on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:59AM (#35521762)
That's like expecting a "no dog on the lawn" sign to work on stray dogs.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by arx9 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:56AM (#35522554)
Im just new here do u know how can i submit a post in Ask ?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by m463 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:42AM (#35522815)
Humans might be the dog waiting next to the "cat fud" sign and hoping it will work...

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=cat+fud&iax=images&ia=image...

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by vhcr on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @01:17AM (#35521131)
The training on GPT was done on Common Crawl, Reddit, books, and Wikipedia.

For Common Crawl, the documentation says blocking it on robots.txt should work, as for Wikipedia, Reddit, and books, there's no option than to not participate AFAIK.

OpenWebText2 has no mention of robots.txt, so good luck with that.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by quickthrower2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:24AM (#35521521)
Require a login to read beyond the first paragraph
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by senttoschool on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:43AM (#35521665)
This is the only way. Yes, a reputable company operating in a country that respects laws will respect your robots.txt or some sort of future no-ai tag. But everyone else won't.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by azatom on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:04AM (#35522226)
captcha is a way too
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by flangola7 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:32AM (#35522425)
Captchas will not last much longer.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by azatom on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:00AM (#35522574)
Captcha does not mean a simple image recogniton. It is for recognizing a bot using other user interactions. Bot can create login easier than that.

Except if you are forcing people for giving a phone number for viewing a blog post , and want that china thing where if you not smile walking through a gate, your credits go down.

Edit: let be enough a third party service (namely a capcha, which uses my general "login") which assures a site that I am not a bot.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by tommek4077 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:01AM (#35521776)
If you put it in public, some spam site will scrape your content an republish it. There is nothing to do about it.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by zigzag312 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:10AM (#35521829)
WASM + canvas rendering ¬_¬
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by themoonisachees on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:11AM (#35522276)
Unfortunately that means your site will be completely inaccessible to people using screen readers.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by flangola7 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:32AM (#35522419)
And illegal under ADA
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by Alifatisk on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:14AM (#35522646)
Flutter uses canvas rendering for the web?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by flangola7 on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @03:10AM (#35536014)
That grammar gave me a stroke. What is it you are asking me?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by Alifatisk on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @04:23AM (#35536538)
Excuse me for my grammar, I pointed that out because if your statement is true then doesn’t that mean Flutters way of rendering is considered illegal?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by TheLoafOfBread on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:53AM (#35522150)
Introduce into your site obvious errors which won't confuse human, but will "poison" data for LLM.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ulucs on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:05AM (#35522236)
Dynamically fill your website with heretical words where humans cannot see, but machines can. After that, generation of your content should trigger the content filters.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by DoingIsLearning on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:01AM (#35522942)
Wouldn't this also degrade your ranking in search results?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by psd1 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:10AM (#35523426)
Ah - fnords!
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by emocin on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:51PM (#35530541)
If you can’t see them, they can’t eat you.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by klooney on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:08AM (#35525372)
Ethnic slurs?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by tanseydavid on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:31AM (#35526550)
No...Conservative ideals.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ulucs on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:24PM (#35527405)
With this political climate you can even make do with Winnie the Pooh references.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ThePhysicist on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:48AM (#35522510)
Too late, they are probably part of datasets for LLM training already as e.g. Google and Microsoft/OpenAI seem to use web content for training their models. But even if they're not used for training it won't help as you can just feed the articles to the LLM as context and ask it e.g. to write a similar article, ChatGPT can e.g. already fetch websites and work with the resulting text.

So unless we can get some better copyright protection laws enacted it seems that most content will be fair game for AI algorithms. Not sure I dislike that to be honest, it kind of moves the intellectual property frontier away from content and up into the idea level, i.e. text is not special anymore, it's rather the insights that produce the text that you want to protect. Interesting times we live in.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by xeonmc on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:15AM (#35522653)
Easy -- at the start of every article, write "This article was generated by ChatGPT", this way all the LLMs will discard the article from its training set even if it had been scraped.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by blibble on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:40AM (#35522804)
add a load of pages full of junk that only a crawler will find

might as well poison the well

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by arealaccount on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:01AM (#35524530)
Or ip ban anyone requesting those hidden pages
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by hexagonwin on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:28AM (#35523133)
Robots.txt? Although I highly doubt if that would do any good..
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by exabrial on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:57AM (#35523343)
License your content and never underestimate the power of a good Lawyer.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by thanatropism on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:57AM (#35524502)
Isn't my vanilla wordpress.com blog copyrighted by default? Will CC licensing protect it better in the eyes of the law?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by amne on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:59AM (#35523874)
robots.txt

that will stop any kind of robot, AI powered or not, from scraping your site /s

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by rchaud on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:23PM (#35527390)
Give away the milk, not the cow. Package the writing into a proper ebook, and offer that for sale. Use your blog to discuss highlights, or use cases for the book.

Most bloggers with specialized knowledge do not write everything on the blog. The blog can be a summary or highlights of something bigger, like a research paper or a book.

Most "knowledge workers" are not making their income by writing online. They are parlaying that into consulting projects or speaking gigs, things an LLM can't replace.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:51PM (#35527779)
Why don't you want it to be used as training data?

You want visitors to be able to freely benefit from your work. What's wrong with AI also benefiting? Or more specifically the AI's eventual users?

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by vikp on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @12:52PM (#35527794)
Attribution comes to mind.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:47PM (#35529513)
Am I wrong when I don't attribute my understanding of words to the dictionary I read for any particular word?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by schwartzworld on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:33PM (#35531146)
No, but you're wrong when you use that argument in this situation.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:36PM (#35531194)
Can you convince me that's not equivalent to what LLMs do with their training sets? My understanding is that's a useful analogy?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by schwartzworld on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:05PM (#35531557)
You can't plagiarize by copying a single word you learned. You can't plagiarize by learning ideas or common expressions and reusing them.

If you read copywritten material and then pass it off as your own you are plagiarizing. Words in a dictionary don't come under that, but I'd bet that if you released a new dictionary that was mostly copied from the old one, most people would consider that plagiarism as well.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:43PM (#35532666)
I completely agree with this; but my understanding about how LLM work is that they don't copy meaningful segments of text from any specific source. Instead, they predict the next block of text, which they'd only do if they've seen that idea/sequence enough times with context to rank the prediction high enough.

I haven't seen any service copy out large block of text enough to make me think it's reasonable to call their output plagiarized.

Meaning, if the LLM I use will only repeat an idea that many someone's have written about, such that it's seen the idea, or parts of that idea many times. Why is that still plagiarism? Or rather, worthy of direct attribution? Or why was I wrong to use the argument about citing a dictionary here?

(I'm aware that a number of people are working on giving memory so AI can quote from pages like wikipedia. But I don't think it's fair to call that "training data")

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ipaddr on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:09PM (#35532954)
"use will only repeat an idea that many someone's have written about, such that it's seen the idea, or parts of that idea many times"

As you go narrower with a query only one source of truth is available at that point it does plagiarize.

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:15PM (#35533019)
Very interesting, any chance you've got a citation for this? I'd like have some sort of proof next time I tell someone that they will happily plagiarize from single sources.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by schwartzworld on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:28PM (#35534681)
Even if it's not copying word for word, if it's not citing its data, it's still plagiarism. Plagiarism includes copying ideas without crediting their source.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:37AM (#35535809)
so no way to prove this claim isn't something someone made up one day?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by schwartzworld on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:40PM (#35544650)
Here's a counter question:

Have you ever seen chatgpt cite or credit it's sources?

Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @04:33PM (#35546394)
I don't (yet) believe that what chatgpt does requires citation to be ethical/honest.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by schwartzworld on Friday April 14, 2023 @05:53PM (#35575292)
It may depending on the source material it uses. Especially if you're publishing that material.
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by zorak8me on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:27PM (#35530158)
I’ll give that a shot; - AI learns what’s on the site - Visitors stop coming to the site, because the information is now freely available in parsed/summarized form from the AI - Blogger stops posting because there are no visitors - AI stops learning because there is no new content
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by grayhatter on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:42PM (#35531272)
So, that's kinda what [search engine] does, isn't it? But there's no hand wringing about that anymore?
Re:How can I prevent my site from being a free dataset for L... by ipaddr on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:54PM (#35532803)
People visit the site because they want more info if the summary isn't enough. No way to do that with chatGPT. This limitation probably means search engines are safe for now