Patreon announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models.
“I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, wrote in a post on Instagram with the superimposed text, “POV: you’re CEO of one of these fucking tech companies, so you do what you want.”
“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.”
Cloudflare is quite bad at blocking much of anything malicious in my experience. This isn’t going to accomplish much.
Lol, they have made a deal with the Internets favorite protection racket.
Let me tell you as both a user and person who scrapes the net, cloud flare is not going to stop this.
“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote.
Oh, awesome, partnering with a corporation that just announced partnering with an AI corporation, not to mention the fact that its already a monopolistic corporation (one sixth of the entire frickin web is now in the hands of Cloudflare) whose CEO is already the richest person in the entire USian state of Utah and is being handed the godly power to dictate who can and who can’t consume the web (“are you using a privacy focused Firefox fork or using an adblocker? Oh, you shall not pass, access denied with no recourse”).
Very “anti-AI” move from Patreon. Might as well feed the content directly to the AI’s maw… What’s next, scanning people’s eyes in order to imitate Google reCAPTCHA’s recent move of requiring doing hand gestures through selfies!? As for anti-AI people among the comments cheering this clear anti-ai-washing PR move from a corporation, really? My goddess, this world is truly messed up.
Flipside: how else am I going to download and archive all the content posted on patreon, if not my own utilities for doing so? They have no native way to download everything.
I get the goal here but if they make it harder for paying customers to archive the content they’re entitled to, that’s actually bad.
Rare patreon W
Not really. Cloudflare is trivial to bypass for crawlers. And has become a very prominent subtle point of failure that can knock out half the web when they’re having issues.
They also took the right side in the Lego drama. Also my kid likes Jack Conte’s band with his wife, oh and there’s the whole “let’s creators make money without being stuck to overly broad TOS online” so I think Jack is putting up dubs left and right
They refuse to use the S?
Insane story. Great time to get into it as updates are happening rapidly.
A used lego reseller (not directly affiliated with the lego corporation) named Bricks and Minifigs stole $200,000 from a dying elderly man.
A youtuber named Reckless Ben got involved to try and help the family out. But the CEO of BAM called the police on him and lied to the police repeatedly, saying Ben was threatening to hurt him and threatening to burn the store down. He called police in Ben’s home state pretending to be Ben and made false bomb threats. He broke his own window and said Ben hired a sniper to try and assassinate him. This is barely the half of it. Ended up getting him arrested multiple times.
All on camera and 100% proven false, but the crazy thing is the CEO is Mormon, along with the entire police department (BAM is in Utah, which is essentially controlled by a Mormon mafia). So in all the bodycam footage released (that they were illegally withholding, but has all come out now) it’s completely plain as day that they’re all actively conspiring together to cover for their fellow Mormons.
Anyway, as part of their attempt to lock this innocent kid in jail for the rest of his life over literally nothing, they sent a legal order to Patreon demanding they shut down Ben’s page. To which the CEO of patreon publicly responded “we’re keeping his page up. If you don’t like it, sue us.”
I think coffeezilla found it was probably closer to $100,000 in value (the Lego collection), still insane chain of events and police corruption
The speculative value has gone back up again since coffeezilla’s vid, but it’s still a very wide range
What a highlight reel. I hope Ben defeats the magic underwear.
I agree, I remember when the pomplemoose guy made patreon, it was a great idea and I think he’s shepherded it pretty well
How will they protect that content being trained for AI models on third party piracy sites where dumps of Patreon subscriber content get published without a paywall. On those sites, there’s no protection.
Like that’s the unfortunate part about a lot of this is a lot of people pay for Patreon access and then just pirate the content out. I’m not against piracy, but I do see the nature of the piracy sites being wide open with no controls or protections from AI scraping that even with Patreon doing this, many are likely to still have their art scraped.
“Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!“
I’m reading the series right now XD i really like it!
But they have absolutely no way to prevent any big AI harvester from harvesting this content, so whatever they claim has no impact whatsoever on what data gets harvested.
Am I missing anything?
No your not, its like the old web crawlers (spiders). Just because you put in your code no crawlers/spiders/bots does it mean they will comply.
I do miss spiders, way better search engine than the garbage we have now…