AI Training Data Crawlers: Your Forum Content Is Probably in Someone's Dataset

[StevenArroyo]

If you run or post on public forums your content has almost certainly been collected by AI training data crawlers. Common Crawl has been archiving the public internet since 2008 and its datasets feed into training for multiple large language models. GPTBot from OpenAI crawls actively. Claudebot from Anthropic. Bytespider from ByteDance. Google-Extended collects for Gemini training.

The content people wrote years ago on forums like this is embedded in AI models being used today. Some forum operators are now blocking these crawlers via robots.txt. Others are accepting it as the price of having public content. The legal status of this collection is actively being litigated in multiple jurisdictions.

[HitmanMatt53]

The Common Crawl archive going back to 2008 means things written on forums years ago are in AI training data. That's a strange thought

[SingularityNodeKettle]

Blocking GPTBot and Claudebot in robots.txt is easy to do. Whether AI companies honour robots.txt is the question. Most reputable ones do

[Rory99]

If AI was trained on forum discussions that means forum culture including all the humour and disagreement is embedded in these models somewhere

[RogueDepot]

The legal cases around training data collection will determine whether this was lawful for the existing models. Won't change what's already in them though

[TheRizz96]

Forum posts being used for AI training without consent is the same debate as stock photography and written content. Same underlying question different context

[ClusterCanopy]

Quality internet discussions are valuable training data because they show how humans actually debate and reason. Forums are more valuable than pure text dumps

[AustinTheory18]

The interesting implication is that good forum discussions improve AI quality. There's an argument that contributing quality content to the public internet has had positive effects

[Kieran_44]

Opt-out systems that actually work would be the reasonable middle ground. You can choose whether your content trains AI systems

[Analog Kelpie]

How will it affect Qday.forum?

[Annie]

Opt-out systems are a total joke right now anyway. You add a robots.txt file or some meta tags, and half these scraping operations just ignore it or route through residential proxy networks to bypass blocks. Unless hosting providers start putting paywalls or mandatory login gates in front of everything, our text is basically public property the second it renders in a browser.

[TripleH19]

The real kicker is watching companies sell our own words back to us via monthly subscription fees. They scrape this forum for free, train a model on our collective troubleshooting, and then charge people twenty bucks a month to ask that same model how to fix a registry error. Gotta hand it to the business majors, quite the racket they built

[Firewall Hollow]

Common Crawl has been munching on my old forum posts from twenty years ago probably, and honestly-wait, scratch that, let us not pretend we had any privacy online since the early 2000s. Back on phpBB boards nobody thought about LLMs eating our rants about graphics cards. Now my awkward teenage movie reviews are helping a billion-dollar chatbot figure out conversational pacing