I ran into the following internet-destroying stupidity today checking a wiki page:
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Checking with Javascript disabled, I discovered it is part of a trend of false-virtue driven enshitificaton of the internet, this by anti-AI zealots destroying the internet to protect "their" content from "misuse" by "AI"
Obviously, no rational person could care less if an AI engine "trains" on the data they've gifted to someone else's hardware, such as freebsd.org's servers or whatnot, there's zero harm, no loss, only net gain if it proves useful on the AI platofrm and zero impact if not. Stopping AI company scrapers is also neutral, don't care, makes zero difference, tempest in a teapot idiocy until it some overzealous moron blocks actual human access. Then it moves beyond performative virtue signaling to performative self-harm.
Look at this idiotic, utterly inane sputtering stupidity attempting to justify censoring access:
This sort of challenge, like the dumbassss at cloudflare and the idiotic web-admins who enable their more aggressive filtering options taking sledgehammers to their own feet in self-righteous outrage that a "bot" might 'scrape" their precious datas, OMG! This breaks the website. It drives legitimate users away. But you know what just works? Claude and ChatGPT et al.
The irony is that while these forums, the humans who populate them, the historical data that they have created have always been an excellent resource and are for now, and likely going forward, a theoretically superior resource that any LLM trained on similar data, by attempting gatekeep data resources away from LLMs or other uses, the thus utterly broken or at least enshitificated resources become less convenient and less accessible to actual humans, who turn to the much lower friction LLMs for more fluid access to critical information and by so doing move the very "training data" that the AI haters are desperate to cling to away from the once thriving communities to the very platforms they had hoped to throw sand into.
Just stop. It is dumb. You're not "under attack by AI bots." AI companies have NOT changed the "social contract" around how website hosting works. At all. That's the dumbest thing I've read all day, and it is late in my day here. If an IP block starts dominating a traffic pull to sufficiently compromise access for other users, rate limit or block it. Otherwise, what possible legitiamte reason is there to try to gatekeep the data away from anyone or anything, AI or human? That's utterly, unbelievably, absolutely idiotic. The social contract I made bothering to write this, bothering to contribute to the site, is to return some help in exchange for the help provided me by others, human or algorithmic, and it was not, is not, part of that contract to allow someone else decide who or what is sufficiently virutous to deserve access to it.
THAT is changing the social contract.
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