on scraper bots

[dragonlady7]

work, AI scrapers, panic

via https://ift.tt/3AXKWCp

This was a reblog of someone else’s post on the topic but they must’ve locked it to non-rebloggable between the time the person I saw it from reblogged it and the time I finished typing up my long well-considered response, which is annoying as fuck, so–

anyway. People are panicking and locking down their shit on AO3 because there’s evidence some AI project is scraping the Archive to train its bots to write, as far as I can tell, high school coffee shop AU omegaverse Harry Potter fic, which like, I’m not sure where they’re gonna use that but I do understand how much of a violation that feels like.

And someone pointed out that people who tend to read the Archive not logged in are gonna be barred from a lot of shit on account of people panicking and locking down their shit (and I might go on, here, that the bots have been through, there’s not a lot of point to it at this juncture guys, but also, your feelings are valid, so do what feels right). And so people might need invites, since there’s a waitlist to join the Archive.

So– 1) It is okay not to freak out individually and understand this is a systemic/larger-picture issue, and to instead pay attention to what the Organization for Transformative Works has to say about it. (Psssst donate to them, that’s why they exist.)

and 2) yeah! existing members of the archive usually have invite codes. For a logged-in user, go to your Dashboard. Up on the right is a button called Invitations; click on that to get invite codes. You have five, I think, and I don’t know how often they get replenished. I currently have five, anyway, and don’t know whether that’s typical. But, if you’re a reader and are worried you’ll lose access to important parts of the archive, maybe now is the time to make an account. Reach out to your favorite authors! Or reach out to fellow-commenters, now before things get locked down.

I think you have to give someone your email address to have it sent to you. If not, it’s possible the donor could just paste the line of code into a message to you, they’d just then have to manually remember they used that one. (Your picture was not posted)