I find this whole anti-LLM stance so weird. It kind of feels like trying to build robot distractions into websites to distract search engine indexers in the 2000's or something.

Like why? Don't you want people to read your content? Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to deliberately get their stuff INTO as many LLMs as fast as possible.

> Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?

Yes, it matters a lot.

You know of authors by name because you read their works under their name. This has allowed them to profit (not necessarily in direct monetary value) and publish more works. Chucking everything into a LLM takes the profit from individual authors and puts them into pockets of gigacorporations.

Not to mention the facts the current generation of LLMs will straight up hallucinate things, sometimes turning the message you're trying to send on its head.

Then there's the question of copyright. I can't pirate a movie, but Facebook can pirate whole libraries, create a LLM and sell it and it's OK? I'd have a lot less of an issue if this was done ethically.

I think at least partially, it's not an anti-LLM stance, it's an anti-"kill my website" stance. Many LLM crawlers behave very poorly, hurting websites in the process. One result of that is that website owners are forced to use things like Anubis, which has the side-effect of hurting everybody else, too.

I prefer this approach because it specifically targets problematic behavior without impacting clients who don't engage in it.

I think it’s obvious.

In simpler terms, it comes down to the « you made this ?, I made this » meme.

Now if your ‘content’ is garbage that takes longer to publish than to write, I can get your point of view.

But for the authors who write articles that people actually want to read, because it’s interesting and well written, it’s like robbery.

Unlike humans, you can’t say that LLM create new things from what they read. LLM just sum up and repeat, evaluating with algorithms what word should be next.

Meanwhile humans… Oscar Wilde — 'I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.'

> Don't you want people to read your content?

People, yes. Well-behaved crawlers that follow established methods to prevent overload and obey established restrictions like robots.txt, yes. Bots that ignore all that and hammer my site dozens of times a second, no.

I don't see the odds of someone finding my site through an LLM being high enough to put up with all the bad behavior. In my own use of LLMs, they only occasionally include links, and even more rarely do I click on one. The chance that an LLM is going to use my content and include a link to it, and that the answer will leave something out so the person needs to click the link for more, seems very remote.

I can think of several anti-LLM sentiments right now:

- developers upset with the threat of losing their jobs or making their jobs more dreadful

- craftspeople upset with the rise in slop

- teachers upset with the consequences of students using LLMs irresponsibly

- and most recently, webmasters upset that LLM services are crawling their servers irresponsibly

Maybe the LLMs don't seem so hostile if you don't fall into those categories? I understand some pro-LLM sentiments, like content creators trying to gain visibility, or developers finding productivity gains. But I think that for many people here, the cons outweigh the pros, and little acts of resistance like this "poisoning well" resonate with them. https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl is another example.

> Don't you want people to read your content?

There's the problem right there. If all you produce is "content" your position makes sense.

If it's ad-supported or I'm seeking donations, I only want people reading it on my website. Why would I want people to access it through an LLM?

I don't want having to pay extra money for vibe-coded LLMs companies bots to scrape my website constantly, ignoring cache headers and the likes.

Every single person who has wrote a book is happy if others read their book. They might be less enthusiastic about printing million copies and shipping them to random people with their own money.