Fighting bots is fighting humans.
One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.
In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as "only allow actual human beings access" because determining who's a human is hard. In practice, it means putting a barrier in front of the website that makes it harder for EVERYONE to access it: gathering personal data, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, etc.
http://mollywhite.net/micro/entry/fighting-bots-is-fighting-humans
Edited 311d ago
@molly0xfff Isn't there a possibility of option 1.1? Keep things open but have SOMETHING in place to keep the abuse, at least moderately, in check?
@scottjenson sure. i'm not saying everyone should, say, drop DDoS protection.
but "only allow humans to access" is just not a feasible metric — you will ALWAYS let bots through and prevent humans, and you need to decide where you want to set the cutoff.
@molly0xfff Oh completely agree! Didn't mean to take away from your main point.