As has been discussed at length, LLM companies carried out the most egregious theft of labor [0] and intellectual property [1] in human history.

I am one among the many (artists, musicians, writers, developers), who continue to be appaled at tech billionaires profiting from this [2]. As such, I have mostly ceased publishing original content online, while I wait for effective defenses to emerge.

The two industry-standards are `robots.txt` and captchas. Neither works: the former is simply ignored, even by industry heavyweights [3]; the latter is trivial to bypass (using AI itself [4], remote solving services [5], or anti-detect browsers/impersonators [6] + residential proxies [7]).

Emerging strategies include special fonts for creating OCR-resistant documents, tho current options don't seem to be effective [8]. Under the "dark forest" theory [9], paywalling or private distribution seem viable options, provided you can trust the recipients to not leak the content; of course, this is a death sentence for the libre ethos of the past 50 years, tho perhaps it was long overdue [10].

Please share your thoughts on any alternatives, real or speculative.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056 - Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' (techcrunch.com)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275073 - Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess' (theverge.com)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 - StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI (benui.ca)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401213 - Brave Sells Its Search Index to AI, and Your Website Is Probably in It (searchenginejournal.com)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49930138 - Meta's Muse is fantastic for web scraping (sigh.dev)

[5] https://captchathecat.com/

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547820 - Curl-Impersonate (github.com/lexiforest)

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864252 - An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation (lwn.net)

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873513 - Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot (mixfont.com)

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566442 - The Cognitive Dark Forest (ryelang.org)

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224074 - PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says (reuters.com)