The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web.

But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real...

Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed data"?

Unless you're reddit, X, Google, or Meta with scary unlimited budget legal teams, you have no power.

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0QyOp7zqcY

> Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?

I'm old enough to remember when people asked the same questions of Hotbot, Lycos, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, and -- eventually -- Google.

Then, as now, it never felt like the right way to frame the question. If you want your content freely available, make it freely available... including to the bots. If you want your content restricted, make it restricted... including to the humans.

It's also not clear to me that AI materially changes the equation, since Google has for many years tried to cut out links to the small sites anyway in favor of instant answers.

(FWIW, the big companies typically do honor robots.txt. It's everyone else that does what they please.)

What if I want my content freely available to humans, and not to bots? Why is that such an insane, unworkable ask? All I want is a copyleft protection that specifically allows humans to access my work to their heart's content, but disallows AI use of it in any form. Is that truly so unreasonable?

Yes, it is an unreasonable and absurd ask. You cannot want freedom while restricting it. You forget that it is people that use AI agents, essentially, being cyborgs. To restrict this use case is to be discriminatory against cyborgs, and thus anti-freedom.

We are lucky that there is no way to detect it.

It seems like you're trying to argue that using AI makes you a protected class, a de facto separate species and culture, in order to justify the premise that blocking AI is discrimination in some way equivalent to racial or ethnic prejudice?

If so, no. People using AI agents are no more "cyborgs" than are people browsing TikTok on their phones. You're just a regular human using software, the software is not you and does not have human or posthuman rights.

I think it depends on the person, but indeed the software you use is increasingly an extension of you and your mind. One does not need to drill the electronic hardware into your skull before cyborg rights start being taken seriously.

Also, I'm not a human.