Re:We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
by omoikane on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @01:10PM
(#35890277)
There is no legal agreement to follow robots.txt, but it appears to have came up a few times (from the first search result for "court cases involving robots.txt"):
If an "ai.txt" were to exist, I hope it's a signal for opt-in rather than opt-out. Whereas "robots.txt" being an explicit signal for opt-out might be useful because people who build public websites generally want their websites to be discovered, it seemed unlikely that training unknown AI would be a use case that content creators had in mind, considering that most existing content predates current AI systems.
https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/legal.html
If an "ai.txt" were to exist, I hope it's a signal for opt-in rather than opt-out. Whereas "robots.txt" being an explicit signal for opt-out might be useful because people who build public websites generally want their websites to be discovered, it seemed unlikely that training unknown AI would be a use case that content creators had in mind, considering that most existing content predates current AI systems.