Chat GPT (and presumeably others) Image Mining

[dabhand16]

Can't find a way to message Admins so posting this here.

In a discussion about sites for sharing images I posted this site that I'm a member of:

Recommendations of posting sites

We are considering posting some of our photos to one or more site but are overwhelmed by the options. In our limited research we have looked at Instagram, Flickr, 500x and more and have become somewhat overwhelmed by the options. Our intent is to definitely not become a social butterfly as we...

bcgforums.com

Today they made this announcement:

We’ve blocked the ChatGPT crawler​

Google says that AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out. We don’t agree that that is the case, so we have opted out!

Is this a good idea and if so, could/should it be done here?

 

[steigw]

I use pixieset to host my photos and your post caused me to ask them what they do to block these new AI bots from mining the images. Here's there response:

Our tech team has investigated this, and has confirmed that while we have many security measures in place to protect your website content from bots and other crawlers, we do not currently have any tools to specifically block ChatGPT or other AI bots from scanning the images on your website. As AI technology is very new and changes quickly, it can be difficult to effectively block these bots, but I can assure you that we take the security of your images seriously. Our team will be looking into ways to better protect images against these new tools as they develop - I'll be sure to reach out if we have any information about this! I appreciate you taking the time to bring this to our attention.

I'd be interested in hearing from others how their chosen hosting platform is taking steps to protect against this type of threat.

 

[hrv]

@Steve you probably want to check this out.

 

[Steve]

Done.

It's just adding a robots.txt file to the root and telling chatGPT not to index the site. No biggie

 

[dabhand16]

Just an update for those of you who use cloud storage:

Cloud companies may lease your images for AI learning; what can you do about it?

Popular photo sharing service Photobucket recently revealed that the 13 billion images it hosts online could be used to train AI models. We explain what changes made this possible and suggest some cloud storage alternatives to keep your data private.

www.dpreview.com