You'd have to find a way to opt out of copy and paste. Even if you could do that someone could take a screenshot (or a photo of their screen) and use the image as input.

What's your concern here - is it not wanting LLMs to train future models on your content, or a more general dislike of the technology as a whole?

The "not train on my content" thing is unfortunately complicated. OpenAI and Anthropic don't train on content sent to their APIs but some other providers do under certain circumstances - Gemini in particular use data sent to their free tier "to improve our products" but not data sent to their paid tiers.

This has the weird result that it's rude to copy and paste other people's content into some LLMs but not others!

I've not seen anyone explicitly say "please don't share my content with LLMs that train on their input" because almost nobody will have the LLM literacy to follow that instruction!

It's a bit of both really. I don't particularly want everything I put on the internet to be slurped and put into The Algorithm(tm), and I was initially positive about LLMs and Image Generation in general but more recently I've just become annoyed at them, especially when I have a lot of friends in the art community

The concern here is that people aren’t happy that LLM parasites are wasting their bandwidth and therefore their money on a scheme to get rich off of other people’s work.

I'm not saying that there aren't problems giving big tech yet another blank check, but aren't we going a bit overboard here? I read the code (it's 100 lines) and it does one (1) GET request. You'd be generating pretty much the same traffic if you went to the webpage yourself.

If that were the case in this particular instance, it would be dang/Ycom putting in the request.

When you use the internet, you are typing words into someone else's computer.

Browsers are getting built-in LLMs for doing things like summarization now, such as https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/summarizer-api - so even if you could license your creations in such a way, it wouldn't prevent a browser extension or someone using the JavaScript console doing it locally without detection. To me, the idea feels arguably similar to asking to opt out of one's words being able to go into a screen reader, a text to speech model, or certain types of displays.

LLMs are powered by web scraping.

The same way Google and others have been crawling and capturing all your public posts for decades to power their search engines. Now the data is being used to power LLMs.

Were you able to opt out of being part of the search index (and I don't mean at the site level with a robots.txt file)?

I think your choice here is "don't post on a publicly accessible website", unfortunately.

> Were you able to opt out of being part of the search index (and I don't mean at the site level with a robots.txt file)?

If you're in the EU, then yes, as "Right to be Forgotten" is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#European...

But in general I agree, the expectation of something remaining "private" and "owned by you" after you publish it on the public internet, should be just about zero. Don't publish stuff you don't want others to read/store/redistribute/archive.

I manually opted in to being on the search index by submitting my website to google. I have never opted in to being part of an LLM dataset

Maybe I misunderstood your original post, I thought you meant your comments here on HN, not a personal website you control.

Others have said it already but when you are posting here on a public website, I would argue that you are effectively consenting that your content is now available for consumption by site visitors.

"Site visitors" may include people, systems, software, etc..

I think it would be pretty impractical for every visitor to the site to have to seek consent from each poster before making use of the content. That would literally break the Internet.

Which search engines are you in that you didn't opt into?

My website currently shows up on bing (which has an opt-out tool, I just haven't bothered to use it), duckduckgo (which scrapes its results from other engines) and yahoo search (which apparently scrapes from bing). I can't check Kagi as I'm not paying for it, and I can't currently think of other search engines off the top of my head

Develop an argot of specialized languge that trips off LLMs. The thing is that has to be accessible to others. Look up cryptolect.

Yes. Do not post your conversations on public, free, forums.

Theoretically you could, but I guess the "User Agreements" on websites like Hackernews tell that all your copyrights for the content you enter belong to them, so it's really up to them afterwards

Yeah, I'm not sure this is following the HN guidelines, judging by the parts about IP Rights...

> Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, [...] or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, [...]. In connection with your use of the Site you will not engage in or use any data mining, robots, scraping or similar data gathering or extraction methods

Though I guess this is a tool to produce such content, rather than the author doing this themselves, its ok?

I'm not really sure actually. But to be honest, I'd rather see these tools be public instead of private; you can't really block this kind of thing anyway. Better have it out in the open where others can benefit/learn...

This whole thing is a Pandora's box. We can regulate, forbid, anything, but we all already have models downloaded locally (you did too, right..?). So unless there's some client-side "computer says no" we will never be able to block this anymore.

No, I don't have any models downloaded locally. I've tried a couple of models in the past and found they aren't that useful for me

How long ago?

The local models were mostly unusably weak until about six months ago when they suddenly got useful: Qwen Coder 2.5, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3 and Gemma 3 have all really impressed me on a 64GB Mac and I expect Mistral Small 3 would work in 32GB.

Meanwhile this years's Gemini Pro 2.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and the most recent GPT-4o API models (or o3-mini high for coding) are significantly better than what we were using last year.

I don't know, 5-6 months ago? I used them, found them acceptable at making human sounding text, and haven't really used them since. I've not found a use-case for them that is useful to me. If I don't know how to program something, I'll google it, or just work it out myself

I wrote about my own processes using LLMs for code here (mainly aimed at people who aren't finding LLMs useful for coding yet): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

It feels like a lot of the advice I'm seeing is aimed at people who just want to have something that works. I program because I like programming, not because I want a finished thing now. The stuff I program at work is well within my abilities, and uses libraries I'm pretty familiar with, so I don't need a program to write it for me, and when I'm doing stuff in my free time, its because I want to program, so I don't want it to be done for me. The best use I've found for LLMs is generating place names in DnD

One of the things I've been appreciating most about LLMs is how they accelerate my exploration of other languages.

I'm fluent in Python and JavaScript, but these days I'm using LLMs to help me get started writing code in AppleScript, Bash, Go, jq, ffmpeg (that command-line interface is practically a programming language just on its own) and more. I'm learning a ton along the way - previously I wouldn't have been able to get up the energy (or time) to climb the initial learning curve for all of those.

You have to take Simon with a grain of salt he confuses demonstrations with solutions. I was just looking at some other code he generated using vibe techniques and it's generally not suitable for anything remotely robust and for some reason the models still think markup languages are regular and can be handled with regular expressions, among many other foot guns present in just about everything. But don't worry! It is us sane people who don't get the joke they'll say and that it is "good enough" lol. I have a really hard time with LLM people who still consider telling people who dissent to go fuck themselves when their work is so insulting and ignorant.

"... for some reason the models still think markup languages are regular and can be handled with regular expressions"

Presumably you mean this code here? https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/blob/e945c84e825f4...

I reviewed it. For this particular application (turning JSON from https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43615912 into a more concise format suitable for feeding into an LLM like https://github.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/blob/e945c84e825f4...) it's perfectly adequate (or "good enough" to quote your comment). You're welcome to convince me otherwise!

The generative AI industry long ago demonstrated that it doesn't think things like "copyright", "Terms of Service" or "laws" apply.

"Terms of Service" are a contractual manner, and in most situations are just treated as suggestions. Whether or not the companies stand in violation of copyright is still being determined. I fail to see what laws they otherwise think don't apply.

On the contrary, it seems there's a lot of people on the Internet who think copyright means something different than it actually does, and therefore justifies them their Dog in the Manger attitude.

It's all public anyway

What reason would you have for that? What is it to you, how other people consume HN?