←back to thread

198 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
SquareWheel ◴[] 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.
replies(2): >>45942461 #>>45942729 #
klodolph ◴[] 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.
replies(1): >>45942613 #
varenc ◴[] 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.

replies(5): >>45942682 #>>45942689 #>>45942743 #>>45942744 #>>45943011 #
hyperhopper ◴[] No.45942682[source]
Confused as to what you're asking for here. You want a robot acting out of spec, to not be treated as a robot acting out of spec, because you told it to?

How does this make you any different than the bad faith LLM actors they are trying to block?

replies(2): >>45942728 #>>45942925 #
1. Spivak ◴[] No.45942925{3}[source]
You're equating asking Siri to call your mom to using a robo-dialer machine.