Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators’ Work for AI Training | CEO Jack Conte: “Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent. If that’s not on the table, the crawlers can stay the fuck off Patreon”

    Posted by KeanuRave100

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    8 Comments

    1. Why does he talk like this 😆 it’s just a Cloudflares subscription which Patreon should have already had anyway

    2. This is like when companies do something to save money and then claim they’re being green. You just don’t want the extra server load.

    3. fool_on_a_hill on

      Jack Conte is the fkin man. Only tech CEO that I respect, and his band kicks ass too

    4. Patreon still allows AI generated “artwork” accounts on their platform in droves. It’s an epidemic and this feels like them coming up with an excuse to say they did something, even though it doesn’t actually meaningfully address the issue because doing so would hurt their bottom line.

    5. CartoonistDismal2818 on

      I am curious how this will work. I support and sub to a **LOT** of artists on Patreon, and so I use gallery-dl, passing cookies from my browser login, to scrape all of my subscriptions.

      I’m not using it for AI, and I’m certainly not uploading it or sharing it anywhere on the web. Why would I do either of those when I paid for this stuff myself, and want to *support* the artist, not *screw* them? I only do it so I have a local copy of everything I’ve ever paid for. With so many subs, and some artists posting frequently, and/or posting multiple images and sometimes even extra zips/movies, it’s nearly impossible for me to keep up with manually downloading all the stuff every day. Especially when some artists only give you access to the current month; if you don’t grab stuff right away, you lose it forever. So I don’t really see anything unethical about what I’m going, though I’m not exactly sure on the TOS.

      It sounds like this may affect that. Granted, if it’s Cloudflare, many scrappers like gallery-dl already have ways to get around that, especially if you’re using valid login cookies. I hope legitimate users can either continue to do this, or they come up with some way for legitimate users to more easily download everything they’re currently subbed to. If not I’ll probably cancel all but a few of my subs. I won’t pay hundreds of dollars a month to look at things in my browser once or twice then lose them forever.