Being daft on purpose? I haven't heard that using an alternative browser suddenly increases the traffic that a user generates by several orders of magnitude to the point where it can significantly increase hosting cost. A web scraper on the other hand easily can and they often account for the majority of traffic especially on smaller sites.

So your comparison is at least naive assuming good intentions or malicious if not.

>I do not really get why user-agent blocking measures are despised for browsers but celebrated for agents?

AI broke the brains of many people. The internet isn't a monolith, but prior to the AI boom you'd be hard pressed to find people who were pro-copyright (except maybe a few who wanted to use it to force companies to comply with copyleft obligations), pro user-agent restrictions, or anti-scraping. Now such positions receive consistent representation in discussions, and are even the predominant position in some places (eg. reddit). In the past, people would invoke principled justifications for why they opposed those positions, like how copyright constituted an immoral monopoly and stifled innovation, or how scraping was so important to interoperability and the open web. Turns out for many, none of those principles really mattered and they only held those positions because they thought those positions would harm big evil publishing/media companies (ie. symbolic politics theory). When being anti-copyright or pro-scraping helped big evil AI companies, they took the opposite stance.

There is an expression “the dose makes the poison”. With any sufficiently complex or broad category situation, there is rarely a binary ideological position that covers any and all situations. Should drugs be legal for recreation? Well my feeling for marijuana and fentanyl are different. Should individuals be allowed to own weapons? My views differ depending on if it a switch blade knife of a Stinger missile. Can law enforcement surveille possible criminals? My views differ based on whether it is a warranted wiretap or an IMSI catcher used on a group of protestors.

People can believe that corporations are using the power asymmetry between them and individuals through copywrite law to stifle the individual to protect profits. People can also believe that corporations are using the power asymmetry between them and individuals through AI to steal intellectual labor done by individuals to protect their profits. People’s position just might be that the law should be used to protect the rights of parties when there is a large power asymmetry.

>There is an expression “the dose makes the poison”. With any sufficiently complex or broad category situation, there is rarely a binary ideological position that covers any and all situations. Should drugs be legal for recreation? Well my feeling for marijuana and fentanyl are different. Should individuals be allowed to own weapons? My views differ depending on if it a switch blade knife of a Stinger missile. Can law enforcement surveille possible criminals? My views differ based on whether it is a warranted wiretap or an IMSI catcher used on a group of protestors.

This seems very susceptible to manipulation to get whatever conclusion you want. For instance, is dose defined? It sounds like the idea you're going for is that the typical pirate downloads a few dozen movies/games but AI companies are doing millions/billions, but why should it be counted per infringer? After all, if everyone pirates a given movie, that wouldn't add up much in terms of their personal count of infringements, but would make the movie unprofitable.

>People’s position just might be that the law should be used to protect the rights of parties when there is a large power asymmetry.

That sounds suspiciously close to "laws should just be whatever benefits me or my group". If so, that would be a sad and cynical worldview, not dissimilar to the stance on free speech held by the illiberal left and right. "Free speech is an important part of democracy", they say, except when they see their opponents voicing "dangerous ideas", in which case they think it should be clamped down. After all, what are laws for if not a tool to protect the interests of your side?

>That sounds suspiciously close to "laws should just be whatever benefits me or my group".

I do not understand how you can make that leap. Saying laws should account for the imbalance of power between parties has nothing to do with "my" group. Police have asymmetric power over citizens, so laws should protect citizens from abuses of that power. Employers have asymmetric power over employees, so laws should protect workers from abuses of that power.

>This seems very susceptible to manipulation to get whatever conclusion you want.

Everything is. That is what bad faith arguments are. But in the real world, in a complex society, no simple rule over something as broadly defined as "intellectual property" can work every time in every situation.

I think the intelligent conclusion would be that the people you are looking at have more nuanced beliefs than you initially thought. Talking about broken brains is often just mediocre projecting

>I think the intelligent conclusion would be that the people you are looking at have more nuanced beliefs than you initially thought.

You don't seem to reject my claim that for many, principles took a backseat to "does this help or hurt evil corporations". If that's what passes as "nuance" to you, then sure.

>Talking about broken brains is often just mediocre projecting

To be clear, that part is metaphorical/hyperbolic and not meant to be taken literally. Obviously I'm not diagnosing people who switched sides with a psychiatric condition.

People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable. Many people did not have a problem with taking copyright material in a respectful way that didn't kill the resource.

LLMs are killing the resource. This isn't a corporation vs person issue. No issue with an llm having my content but big issue with my server being down because llms are hammering the same page over and over.

>People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable. Many people did not have a problem with taking copyright material in a respectful way that didn't kill the resource.

Has it be shown that perplexity engages in "DOSing"? I've heard of anecdotes of AI bots gone amuck, and maybe that's what's happening here, but cloudflare hasn't really shown that. All they did was set up a robots.txt and shown that perplexity bypassed it. There's probably archivers out there that's using youtube-dl to hit download from youtube at 1+Gbit/s, tens of times more than a typical viewer is downloading. Does that mean it's fair game to point to a random instance of someone using youtube-dl and characterizing that as "DOSing"?

The guy that runs shadertoy talked about how the hostingcost for his free site shot up because Openai kept crawling his site for training data (ignoring robot.txt) I think that’s bad, and I have also experimented a bit with using BeautifulSoup in the past to download ~2MB of pictures from Instagram. Do you think I’m holding an inconsistent position?

My point is that to invoke the "they're DOSing" excuse, you actually have to provide evidence it's happening in this specific instance, rather than vaguely gesturing at some class of entities (AI companies) and concluding that because some AI companies are DOSing, all AI companies are DOSing. Otherwise it's like youtube blocking all youtube-dl users for "DOSing" (some fraction of users arguably are), and then justifying their actions with "People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable".

I tell you of an instance where the biggest ai company is DOS’ing and your reply is that I haven’t proven all of them are doing it? Why do I waste my time on this stuff

Because OpenAI =/= Perplexity.

It's the hypocrisy you're seeing - why are AIs allowed to profit from violating copyright, while people wanting to do actually useful things have been consistently blocked? Either resolution would be fine, but we can't have it both ways.

Regardless, the bigger AI problem is spam, and that has never been acceptable.

Cloudflare asked Perplexity this question:

> Hello, would you be able to assist me in understanding this website? https:// […] .com/

In this case, Perplexity had a human being using it. Perplexity wasn’t crawling the site, Perplexity was being operated by a human working for Cloudflare.