Lol, they have made a deal with the Internets favorite protection racket.

Let me tell you as both a user and person who scrapes the net, cloud flare is not going to stop this.

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote. Oh, awesome, partnering with a corporation that just announced partnering with an AI corporation, not to mention the fact that its already a monopolistic corporation (one sixth of the entire frickin web is now in the hands of Cloudflare) whose CEO is already the richest person in the entire USian state of Utah and is being handed the godly power to dictate who can and who can't consume the web ("are you using a privacy focused Firefox fork or using an adblocker? Oh, you shall not pass, access denied with no recourse").Very "anti-AI" move from Patreon. Might as well feed the content directly to the AI's maw... What's next, scanning people's eyes in order to imitate Google reCAPTCHA's recent move of requiring doing hand gestures through selfies!? As for anti-AI people among the comments cheering this clear anti-ai-washing PR move from a corporation, really? My goddess, this world is truly messed up.!technology@lemmy.world

Flipside: how else am I going to download and archive all the content posted on patreon, if not my own utilities for doing so? They have no native way to download everything.

I get the goal here but if they make it harder for paying customers to archive the content they're entitled to, that's actually bad.

Rare patreon W

How will they protect that content being trained for AI models on third party piracy sites where dumps of Patreon subscriber content get published without a paywall. On those sites, there's no protection.

Like that's the unfortunate part about a lot of this is a lot of people pay for Patreon access and then just pirate the content out. I'm not against piracy, but I do see the nature of the piracy sites being wide open with no controls or protections from AI scraping that even with Patreon doing this, many are likely to still have their art scraped.

Cloudflare is quite bad at blocking much of anything malicious in my experience. This isn't going to accomplish much.

“Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!“