zlacker

>>Jeanne+(OP)
Using robots.txt as a model for anything doesn't work. All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative.

Robots.txt has failed as a system, if it hadn't we wouldn't have captchas or Cloudflare.

In the age of AI we need to better understand where copyright applies to it, and potentially need reform of copyright to align legislation with what the public wants. We need test cases.

The thing I somewhat struggle with is that after 20-30 years of calls for shorter copyright terms, lesser restrictions on content you access publicly, and what you can do with it, we are now in the situation where the arguments are quickly leaning the other way. "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration...

In many ways an ai.txt would be worse than doing nothing as it's a meaningless veneer that would be ignored, but pointed to as the answer.

>>samwil+H5
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"):

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.