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Blocking LLM crawlers without JavaScript

(www.owl.is)
198 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 15 Nov 25 23:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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SquareWheel ◴[16 Nov 25 01:51 UTC] No.45942060[source]▶
That may work for blocking bad automated crawlers, but an agent acting on behalf of a user wouldn't follow robots.txt. They'd run the risk of hitting the bad URL when trying to understand the page.
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klodolph ◴[16 Nov 25 03:14 UTC] No.45942461[source]▶
That sounds like the desired outcome here. Your agent should respect robots.txt, OR it should be designed to not follow links.
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varenc ◴[16 Nov 25 03:50 UTC] No.45942613[source]▶
An agent acting on my behalf, following my specific and narrowly scoped instructions, should not obey robots.txt because it's not a robot/crawler. Just like how a single cURL request shouldn't follow robots.txt. (It also shouldn't generate any more traffic than a regular browser user)

Unfortunately "mass scraping the internet for training data" and an "LLM powered user agent" get lumped together too much as "AI Crawlers". The user agent shouldn't actually be crawling.

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1. AmbroseBierce ◴[16 Nov 25 04:22 UTC] No.45942744[source]▶
Maybe your agent is smart enough to determine that going against the wishes of the website owner can be detrimental to your relationship the such website owner and therefore the likelihood of the website to continue existing, so is prioritizing your long-term interests over your short-term ones.