Raw LLM Responses

With regards to AI labyrinths, and bot crawlers going to websites to steal art, while ignoring the no-robots metadata, I've experienced that firsthand. I have a very small website that I put my art on. It's hosted on a friend's personal webserver, and it copes admirably with my audience of a few thousand readers, very very occasionally some large creator or website, or big subreddit links to my site and we get a traffic spike of a few tens of thousands that slows the entire server to a standstill, but that tends to only last for a couple of hours, and it's only happened very rarely. I've been making art for some time now, and there's several thousand images in my webspace. These AI scraper bots aren't like search engine spiders that just look at a page's meta tags and index it. They arrive at the site, fetch the sitemap, and then immediately request the server supply them with every image file on the site, gigabytes of data all in one go. They're relentless. My webserver had a very simple way to deal with the problem, which is that if there's too much traffic, it shuts down. It reboots at the start of each hour if it was shut down. This is the only thing you can really do, since AI-crawlers use a variety of underhanded tactics to try and get data (e.g. they might pretend to be hundreds of users each asking for a little bit of the data, or they constantly change their IPs so you can't ban them etc.) - At the start of this year, I was being hit with these crawlers so often that my website uptime had dropped from 99.99% in 2023, to less than 1%. The moment my webhost's server went up it got an onslaught of attacks from AI-crawlers trying to grab all the data they could. It's basically like having a constant DDoS across the entire web. Big sites can absorb that kind of traffic, but small creators can't operate. Now, I'm using Cloudflare's implementation of one of these AI-Labyrinths, and it's (mostly) solved the problem. It sends hundreds of these bots into the labyrinth every day, and that's great, but also... Cloudflare charge a lot of money for that service, it's more than doubled the operating cost of my site to have to do this. All I want to do is share my art with my friends. The impact is pretty insidious. If you're a small creator who wants to make their own space, they're effectively forcing you to pay for huge amounts of webhosting (just so they can operate THEIR business), or pay for a service to protect against their abuse. Is a new artist, starting on their journey, willing to shell out hundreds of dollars a year just to be able to share their art with their friends? It's massively discouraging. It's not JUST about protecting our art and our styles from being used for the profit of megacorporations, it's also about whether artists get to exist at *all*.