ai-petition.neocities

The response so far

Kyle Drake on Bluesky 1/17/2025
It's interesting to think of the CO2 cost (assuming conventional electricity sources?) to train GPT4 as "200 flights from New York to San Francisco", which happens every 2 days. andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for

It's dawning on me from reading this that a lot of people maybe don't realize how incredibly energy efficient (non-PoW-crypto) computing is in general. In December I handled 1.4 billion site hits with the total combined power of a microwave. I think a single car has that beat on climate impact.

Neocities on Bluesky 1/21/2025 4:41am
Wanted to talk about Neocities' approach to AI. First, some new positions going forward:

- We will never make you use AI if you don't want to
- We will help you stop AI crawlers if you want to
- We won't use false positive heavy AI blockers
- We won't be "anti-AI" either and ban sites for using it

Starting this month, all new Neocities sites now come with a robots.txt. robots.txt is the file that controls how bots access your site. The newly provided robots.txt contains a commented out list of known AI crawlers that you can uncomment if you would like to opt out of AI crawling.

Why are we choosing AI crawler management with robots.txt? Because this approach gives sites total control over the process, and also respects web standards. This is the agreed upon way by all parties to maintain a web site's control over the process. It's not perfect, but everything else is worse.

For example, some platforms approach this with IP/Agent blocking but this is a disaster. For example CF's AI powered AI blocker blocks legitimate users from ~viewing~ web sites (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4257...). Sans DDoS mitigation, Neocities never blocks IP addresses from browsing web sites.

This approach also works in scenarios where IP blocking won't. For example. Applebot is used for all Apple crawling, but Applebot-Extended in the robots.txt file opts out of AI (support.apple.com/en-us/119829). If you just block Applebot you're blocking search engine indexing and link previews too.

If you have an existing site and want to block AI, you can create your own robots.txt and add the blockers. We're going to be updating our list using this one for now (note the Applebot entry - will be sending a PR later today): github.com/ai-robots-tx...

Lastly: Neocities is also not going to stop anyone from using AI or be tinfoil hat crazy about it either. If you're using AI to help learn HTML or to fix bugs in your code, that's totally fine. If you want AI to index your site and provide it for people using LLMs as search engines, that's fine too.

The whole point is to give web sites on Neocities as much control as possible over this, so the sites control this process rather than us. Things are moving fast, so we'll keep watching this space as things evolve and new developments/standards happen to see if tweaks need to be made.

Neocities on Bluesky 1/21/2025 1:07pm
To clear things up from the earlier thread: - We introduced functionality to choose to deny AI crawlers using a new default robots.txt and to promise we will never force you to use AI on Neocities. - Generated low-quality content (AI or otherwise) is considered SPAM and has always been banned.

What I meant to say is, if you use it to debug or code as a personal choice, we're not going to ban you for doing that (I don't know how we would anyways). AI generated content is low quality, people don't like it, kind of defeats itself even if we don't ban it. My apologies for the poor wording.

Also: I'm not calling people opposed to AI tinfoil-hat crazies. What I'm calling tinfoil hat crazy is using snake oil IP/CF blockers that also dragnet millions of legitimate users and VPNs into mass IP bans. That's bad for the web & real humans, and does nothing to block well-made malicious scrapers

Points to raise

Penelope has not been removed. Penelope is still in the source code.

The moral and legal implications of using AI trained on non consenting or unware people.

Is neocities scraping or planning to scrape our site's data?

Timeline

On June 2nd 2023, Kyle Drake posted a blog post about his thoughts on AI. You can view this blog here(archive).

On April 1st 2024, a coding assistant (AI) called "Daria" was introduced to the editor.

On April 21st, I noticed that in the editor there was another coding assistant called Penelope. I asked it "Is this AI?" and it responded with whats in the image below.

Penelope was no longer visible sometime between me sending a message about it and when Jodie finally responded. I have heard nobody else talk about this initial sighting of Penelope so I felt it was important to dig up this chat log.

On July 7th 2024, it was discovered that the code is still in place for Penelope.
Link to Reddit Post(archive)

In the post, Kyle responded to a comment. This account is a moderator for the neocities subreddit so I am pretty sure it's not someone pretending to be him.

Penelope is for sure still in the source code of the editor, these are screenshots that I took for my personal site's blog recently.

If you change "none" to "block" on the line below, penelope's chatbox window appears
<div class="col right-col chat-container" style="display: none">

Attempting to talk with penelope results in a error

If you have firefox and want to check it out yourself, open the source code within the editor, press ctrl + f, then type "penelope". It should be the second one.

Personal thoughts from my blog

I have a hard time justifying the majority of what Kyle said in his blog. Getting caught up on the idea that people compare AI's danger to that of nuclear threat is... interesting albeit missing the point. AI poses lots of danger but getting caught up on just one thing feels wrong. He does mention that AI contributes to climate change but said it in a way that feels like he's trying to discredit safe.ai.

In the reddit comment that Kyle made, he states that he wants to impliment AI in a way that does not alienate people that don't want to use it so it's on hold for now. I don't think this is possible with any form of social media including neocities without alienating the group that does not want it and/or an outright worse experience for everyone. This also ignores the fact that Kyle stated in his blog post that there are climate change concerns with AI. The fact that it's "on hold" implies he still plans on implementing it at some point.

If you want some help to avoid ai webcrawlers you can setup a file called robots.txt. Copy and paste the contents of https://owly.fans/robots.txt into your robots.txt file and you should be good to go. It's not going to stop everything but it will stop well known AI web crawlers that respect robots.txt. Not all of them do, I am currently looking for a better option in regards to neocities sites.

The environmental impact of AI

AI requires a ton of power to function. Most AI is hosted within datacenters which adds a very noticable amount to the amount of water required to get rid of the heat generated. The data centers themselves require a ton of materials and rare metals to make... only for you to need more when something like this happens.

E-waste is big concern with all of this. Some people will try to act like AI is great for the environment but any percieved "good" is massively outweighed by the amount of resources required to run AI.

"Childish" and "Divisive"

The AI sucks image is here to stay. If you read everything on this page, have not been living under a rock for the past few years, and still think it's "childish" or "divisive" then you very likely suck. Also the environmental impact section of this page is here mostly to point out the hypocrisies of Kyle's actions and words, not to steal and rehost the research that has already been done on the topic! Below are links to some external articles explaining the risks of AI.