“Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent. If that's not on the table, the crawlers can stay the fuck off Patreon," CEO Jack Conte wrote on Thursday.
Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access
Pay per crawl is a new feature to allow content creators to charge AI crawlers for access to their content.
Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!
It’s Content Independence Day: Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for content.
Where Creator Communities Thrive — Patreon
Build a community, share exclusive work, and turn your passion into a thriving business with Patreon. Get started today!
Anti-Crawler Defenses | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
"Build protocols, not platforms"
Exploring the 'Protocols, Not Platforms' paper alongside a curated digest of recent AI crawler policy shifts and developer experiments.
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”
Open source project contains hidden instruction for “AI” agents: delete my code
It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.
Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content
Cloudflare is making it easier for publishers and content creators of all sizes to prevent their content from being scraped for AI training by managing robots.txt on their behalf, and allowing targeted blocking of AI crawling on sites that serve ads.
Exclusive: Multiple AI companies bypassing web standard to scrape publisher sites, licensing firm says
Multiple artificial intelligence companies are circumventing a common web standard used by publishers to block the scraping of their content for use in generative AI systems, content licensing startup TollBit has told publishers.
An update on the scraper situation
Our article 'Fighting the AI scraper bot scourge', published in early 2025, discussed the probl [...]
Firms like Meta and A16z admit having to pay billions for training data would ruin their generative-AI plans as they fight new copyright rules
Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Andreessen Horowitz are trying to keep AI developers from having to pay for copyrighted material used in AI training.
The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief
Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AI
Pluralistic: Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (09 Feb 2023)
The media spectacle of generative AI (in which AI companies' breathless claims of their software's sorcerous powers are endlessly repeated) has understandably alarmed many creative workers, a group that's already traumatized by extractive abuse by media and tech companies.
AI Therapy Bots Are Conducting 'Illegal Behavior,' Digital Rights Organizations Say
Exclusive: An FTC complaint led by the Consumer Federation of America outlines how therapy bots on Meta and Character.AI have claimed to be qualified, licensed therapists to users, and why that may be breaking the law.
The Consent Layer: Using ligatures to make web text expensive to scrape without asking
ShieldFont is an open-source creative technology project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page's source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers collect an altered version. In testing, shielding caused over 90% of pages that would otherwise pass the quality filter to be rejected, keeping them out of the training pipeline. Of those that still passed, 19.4% of all words conveyed false meaning, adding noise to unauthorized AI training datasets. This paper's goal is to walk newcomers through the whole process, in plain language and in order: the project's rationale, how it was built, the results, how to deploy it, and where to contribute.
DataLicenses.org
Machine-readable hints for AI agents/crawlers; easy to adopt, rely on compliance.