Ask HN: What measures are you taking to stop AI crawlers?
Curious to know what steps people here are taking to protect their sites, products, and APIs. What have you tried that actually works in practice?
Cloudflare makes doing this kind of stuff easy but I would hate to have to do this manually on a webserver. And I don't like the idea of how much of the internet already relies on Cloudflare.
I'm eager for a good solution that will allow me to put them back, but I'm doubtful that's going to happen. In any case, I'm extremely interested in other people's replies here. Maybe there's a solution that I haven't been able to find!
Some people are worried about the volume, but at worst your site is down for a while. Unless you're on serverless, but in that case you would've had to be worried about hackers before AI crawlers existed.
If it's IP theft, if someone's motivated enough to get past Cloudflare/Anubis, you would've had to worry about them before AI crawlers existed too.
> Especially when there's services/tools like Cloudflare and Anubis that solve that.
They don't solve it. They offer some help, but it's far from good enough.
The exact reason why I don't want my stuff included isn't really relevant to the topic, honestly ("I don't like it" is plenty sufficient reason, after all), but I will say there are multiple reasons. The main issue is that if it happens, there's no way to correct for that.
IP violation is one of them, but not the main one -- but it does illustrate the point: in the case of more traditional IP "theft", there is technically a way to resolve the problem after it happens. Not so with genAI crawlers.
I don't want my stuff to get used to train genAI because I think that genAI is, on the whole, a negative for society. Not because of anything inherent in the technology itself, but because of the way genAI companies are employing and marketing it. On top of that, I resent that genAI companies have abused my trust by slurping everything up to train the models without asking or even so much as a "how do you do" (this is a different than an IP law argument).
I also think that genAI companies are increasingly abusive and manipulative and don't want to support them in any way. And the fact that they often argue about how dangerous the technology is and the great risk to humanity it presents, but at the same time are eager to develop and sell it, indicates an extreme level of ethical bankruptcy.
And if you really want to prevent any chance of that happening, the only way is to take it down unfortunately.
They say "... can scrape any website—not even Cloudflare can detect it."