Byebye AI

WordPress Plugin to prevent AI bots from crawling your website.

Features

• Blocks known AI crawler according to the user agent string.
• If possible the .htaccess is used for blocking.
• Additionally robots.txt
• Daily blocklist updates from the ai.robots.txt project

Installation

Requirements

• A writable .htaccess
• No static robots.txt

Production

• Head over to releases
• Download 'byebye-ai.zip'
• Upload and activate it like any other WordPress plugin
• WordPress will auto-update the plugin as long as it is active

Development

• cd into your plugin directory
• $ git clone git@github.com:mcguffin/byebye-ai.git
• $ cd byebye-ai
• $ npm install && npm run dev

Using Composer

composer require mcguffin/byebye-ai

NAQ (Never asked questions)

But AI is soooo cooooool! Why keep it from scraping my content?

There is a huge expropriation going on, driven by huge AI companies like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Apple or Meta. It is you, who is being ripped off the produces of your passion or profession. Thoughts you did a lot of research on, worksyou devoted half a lifetime on creating them, emotions you felt and tried to express, all of this is taken away from you and stuffed into a stochastic model, that describes what probable word or sentence might com next according to a given input. Imagine it as a sophisticated autocomplete, the use of which will be the more expensive the more people are depending on it.

As a result we currently see boatloads of cheapish text extruding machines, despite the AI Booster’s claims neither artificial nor intelligent, being deployed in order to replace human care labor, regardless of being appropriate or not, no matter what community is stamped to the ground during the process.

All right … no so cool—in the present. But in the future we will <insert scifi here>!

The future envisioned by the AI Boosters—and AI-Doomers as well—is bare of caring human labor in most fields.

Would you entrust a sophisticated autocomplete system with a lawsuit that is existential for you? Is a stochaistic system the right solution to nurse your defenseless grandad? Would you ride an autonomous machine that doesn‘t recognize cars with traffic cone attached to it?

In the future we will for sure see more machines that mimick human behaviour (or what some rich white guys in Silcicon Valley believe it to be) but you can imagine the results less like the ship‘s computer on Star Trek and more like the one in John Carpenter‘s Dark Star, that says “Thank you for regarding all safety precautions” while accidentially throwing an astronaut out of the airlock.

OMG! We are all doomed and will be turned into paperclips by rouge AI!

You are more likely be forced to leave your home due to climate change. Or to fall into poverty and debt due to the ongoing mis-distribution of wealth. Or being beaten up or shot dead by any kind of supremacists for having the wrong face or using the wrong word or installing the wrong WordPress plugin. Or to have your kids being taken away from you because some text generating device randomly picked some snippets, that claim there is the high “risk” you are a terrible parent.

So you say the so-called “AI” is being used to replace human relations? Why?

That‘s the point, yes. As an example: Zuckerberg blatantly claimed in a podcast, the average—read: male, white and wealthy—American is wishing for 14 friends but has only two. So there‘s a market gap for up to twelve chatbot “friendships” per person. We should not forget Meta is an advertising company, so you can imagine these chatbots are just there to tell you the bullshit somebody is paying for to be told—no matter if it‘s commercial advertising, political propaganda.

What to do about it?

• Grow awareness of your and others emotions, foster your personal relationships, find and/or support your comunity, short: be the human that you think a human should be. Focus on real reality and don‘t let the AI Boosters distract you from this.

• Avoid their controlled environments like Twix, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and alike where they rip you of your human experiences turning it into behavioural data to feed into their machines.

• If you‘re doing visual art, there are some tools allowing you to mask away your artwork from media generators or event fill the stochasitic models with garbage so they produce garbage results. (Look out for Glaze and Nightshade.)