this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt (www.theverge.com)
submitted 8 months ago by TravisKelce@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 91 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.

if exists("/robots.txt"):
    no it fucking doesn't
[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 50 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don't waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It's there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.

[–] DingoBilly@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It's one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.