---
title: This Site Blocks AI
description: As something of a form of protest and as a way to express my extreme distaste for generative AI, I've made a change to my robots.txt file to block a number of known AI scrapers.
publishedDate: 2024-03-13
updatedDate:
  - 2025-04-22
imageURL: /blog/this-site-blocks-ai/carbon.png
tags:
    - manifesto
    - website
---
I hold the opinion that generative AI is really, really bad. I take pride in never knowingly using AI in the things I create, and as of today I take pride in taking at least some effort to prevent my work being used as AI training material. 

It's a known fact that many of the huge models that exist today are trained on publicly accessible data - from images and text on websites, it's a fair bet that if you're looking at something published on the internet, it's been used as AI training data.

Many consider this to be a form of theft - be it illustrations, photography, written words or something else - as content is being taken and used without consent, often for monetary gain, sometimes to the detriment of the creator.

I certainly do not consent to my work being taken and used - in fact, to take my work from this site and incorporate it into an AI model could be considered to be a violation of the license my site is covered by, the [Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0). Modification or distribution without attribution and for commercial uses is forbidden by that license, and you can bet your bottom dollar no AI models would list me in their credits were my words to be taken and used.

But aside from that very self-centred standpoint, the social and ethical dilemmas involved with generative AI are paramount to me too. One example is the enshittification of search engines. Sure, it's no secret that for years search engines have been overrun with SEO-optimised, money-grabbing rubbish. The key difference is that now with AI, the creation of more SEO-optimised garbage is not only further enabled but made trivially easy to automate. A few years ago SEO-junk was prevalent but avoidable, and these days it's becoming ever-harder to sift useful information out of your search results.[^1] The complete destruction of humanity's greatest invention has been accelerated to impossible speeds by AI - there's no undoing the damage that has already been caused. *And it's only going to continue to get worse.*

This is only one example of the wider problems of AI, but there exist many more. I'm sure you'll be able to think of some; if you can't, [Edward Zitron's article entitled "Are We Watching The Internet Die?"](https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/) has *so* many.[^2]

As something of a form of protest and as a way to express my extreme distaste for generative AI, I've made a change to [my `robots.txt`](/robots.txt) file to block a number of known AI scrapers. It won't stop everything - I have no doubt that Google uses its search indexes for training data, and who's to say that the companies behind some models aren't just ignoring `robots.txt`? But it's at least an effort.

--- 

Here are some links to some other writing on the topic:

* [The internet is slipping out of our reach](https://injuly.in/blog/darker-internet/index.html) - a longer form post about the destruction of search engines
* [Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website](https://neil-clarke.com/block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-by-scraping-your-website/) - contains details about various different methods of blocking AI crawlers
* [Go ahead and block AI web crawlers](https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/go-ahead-and-block-ai-web-crawlers) - my inspiration to make this change to my site and to write this post

**Edit (2025-04-22):** I've recently switched to using this [`ai.robots.txt`](https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt) as a source for my `robots.txt` file now.

---

[^1]: This is why you'll often see people tacking things like "reddit" or "wiki" onto the ends of their search queries in a desperate effort to find actual, real human words about something.
[^2]: By the way, the entire article is excellent, well written and your time to read. I found it very much paralleling many of my own thoughts that I don't have the time to write here.