Patreon announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models.
“I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, wrote in a post on Instagram with the superimposed text, “POV: you’re CEO of one of these fucking tech companies, so you do what you want.”
“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. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.”
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.