Blocking AI / LLM User-Agents from Songcrafters?

[Ted]

I was just listening to Kenny Mac's song The rise of Ai, and I wondered if Songcrafters had any kind of policy or prohibition about Large Language Models (LLMs) from scraping the content from this site.

Have we considered whether we will allow LLMs to use Songcrafters pages – posts, lyrics, music – as training data?

I'm in favor of it – blocking LLMs that is. Although, the horse may be out of the barn. I also know that the methods I can detect (i.e. by looking at robots.txt for directives like these or the HTML for robots directives in tags) are the exact kind of directives that AI scrapers are known to ignore completely (articles 1, 2, 3, 4). So perhaps there are already measures in place that I can't detect – such as server configurations or firewall rules.

We put a lot of effort into our songs and lyrics, and while some of us freely share our work, others are more protective of our IP. If AI models train on our content without consent, they could reproduce or repurpose our creativity without credit or compensation. If we want to try to keep LLMs off this site, we should consider leaning towards the more restrictive end of the spectrum.

I'm curious to hear what the administrators and members think about this. Have any steps already been taken? If not, is this something we might want to discuss?

[chapperz66]

I suspect that this is something that I should be very concerned about, but I have very little to add that might prevent it.  If it were quick and easy then I guess I would be in favour of stopping malicious individuals from doing dodgy things with my music.  However, if this hampered other Songcrafters members from listening to my stuff then probably not.  I often post my stuff on other sites too, so even if it is possible to make this site totally secure, then they (whoever "they" are) would probably find a way to get access elsewhere.

I try very hard not to worry about things that I cannot affect, and since I have not made loads of money from my music I haven't lost anything if someone else does. 

I hope that doesn't sound too apathetic.

[Ted]

If it were quick and easy then I guess I would be in favour of stopping malicious individuals from doing dodgy things with my music.  However, if this hampered other Songcrafters members from listening to my stuff then probably not.

The measures against LLMs scraping info wouldn't affect any humans from accessing the site. Aside from the polite measures that ask the bots to go away, the more aggressive measures would detect bots and block them. And it may be the case that these measures are already in place on Songcrafters, but I can't detect any. (Not that I'm a specialist in this stuff.)