As annoying as this is, it’s to prevent LLMs from training themselves using Reddit content, and that’s probably the greater of the two evils.
That’s all well and good, but how many LLMs do you think actually respect robots.txt?
from my limited experience, about half? i had to finally set up a robots.txt last month after Anthropic decided it would be OK to crawl my Wikipedia mirror from about a dozen different IP addresses simultaneously, non-stop, without any rate limiting, and bring it to its knees. fuck them for it, but at least it stopped once i added robots.txt.
Facebook, Amazon, and a few others are ignoring that robots.txt, on the other hand. they have the decency to do it slowly enough that i’d never notice unless i checked the logs, at least.
It’s to profit from training LLMs: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/your-reddit-posts-may-train-ai-models-following-new-60-million-agreement/
