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Brief update on our ongoing efforts to allow users to specify consent (or not) for AI training: 🧵

We recently shared Bluesky’s stance on user data and AI training, which has not changed. Bluesky will not train generative AI on user data. bsky.app/profile/bsky...

Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself. Websites can specify whether they consent to outside companies crawling their data with a robots.txt file, and we’re investigating a similar practice here.

robots.txt is a thin barrier to prevent the whole site to be used generative AI, i could write a crawler in just a few hours that could completely bypass that. this feels more like PR than putting in serious safeguards to protect people’s data

What safeguards would align with their open web principles?

Cloudflare allows blocking of all known AI crawlers while not impacting anything or anyone else

My assumption is they are using the firehose, not web scraping.

Possibly, but making it harder for these people, many of which aren't that technically inclined and don't think past simple things, is better than nothing

It ain't just engineers, it's predominantly a bunch of brodudes that don't know the first thing about anything, and those are easily preventable. Ignoring the low hanging fruit because not everyone is as dense as they are is bad policy.

Which brodudes compiled this dataset?

It's not about this one dataset, honestly your argument pretty much amounts to "because an arsonist could set my entire house on fire before I react, I don't need a fire extinguisher at home". Ignoring the things that can be done because there's fringe cases is ridiculous.