- Hate For AI Shouldn't Overpower Love For Humans

With increasing frequency and disruption, I’m seeing people hide sites behind bot protections or kill them altogether just to prevent the content on them from being used for AI training. I generally think this is bad.

I can understand such a decision from the perspective of scrapers running up financial costs. Sure, you shouldn’t have to pay so that some company that doesn’t care about you in the slightest can overwhelm your website. Depending on your hosting and structure, it could be a significant financial burden. However, when people put up aggressive blocks or take down their site because of ideological disagreements with scraping or AI in general, it feels misguided.

Piling up anti-bot protections does very little to stop determined bots. Even less determined bots are often able to bypass protections, as they rarely hold up for long. Aggressive scraping operations will spin up full versions of Chrome from residential IP addresses and will scrape your site, even if it takes a while. Most protections are security theatre. In many cases protection solutions are directly associated with AI companies – like a protection racket.

Most protections do harm actual people, though. Having their phone come to a halt while it heats up to solve the complex maths of Anubis, or having to perform some asinine CAPTCHA task that likely isn’t completable for many people with accessibility considerations, or getting held up by a few seconds of delay when loading up a page. At the scale of AI systems, they can automate bypasses for most of these protections. It is individual people that are being inconvenienced.

I’ve heard the argument, ‘But at least I’m inconveniencing the scrapers or making them do more work’. Think about the financial figures flung about the AI space. To scrape sites costs a pittance and doesn’t inconvenience AI companies at all. All that is necessary is for your content to be scraped once, and it is in the training data forever after. It was likely scraped before you even considered blocking them, and it only takes one slip-up of even a hypothetical perfect protection for a site to end up in a data set.

I get the anger and feelings of violation. I agree that it isn’t right for scrapers to act as they do and for companies to exploit the openness of the web. However, at the point where we inflict more damage to humans than we do to AI, what is the point? Is our primary goal to do good for ourselves and other people on this planet, or to make weak attempts at inconveniencing AI? Why are you blocking scrapers? Is it to protect human creativity or to protect humans from your creativity? To reduce human expression in the face of automation is to concede to the machine.

I’m sure this sounds, to an extent, like I’m trying to be an AI apologist or that I’m saying you should give in to AI. If this is what it sounds like, then you’re misinterpreting me. My view is just that we should, as people, prioritise expressing ourselves and doing good for other people rather than harming people to spite AI.