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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

LLMs.txt should let me specify the $$$ price that companies must send me to train models on my content.

No, see you're supposed to create and upload this specially formatted file on all your webservers for free, just to make it a little easier for them to take all your content for free, so that they can then use your content in their products for free, so they can charge other humans money to get your content from their product without any humans ever having to visit your actual website again. What's not to like?

If they had to pay for all the content they take/use/redistribute they wouldn't be able to make enough money off of your work for it to be worthwhile.

But there is actually a reason to use this standard. See, if your goal is to alter the perception of AI models, like convincing them certain genocides did not exist or that certain people are(n't) criminals, you want AI to index your website as efficiently as possible.

Together with websites that make money off trying to report the truth shielding their content from plagiarism scrapers, this means that setting up a wide range of (AI generated) websites all configured to be ingested easily will allow you to alter public perception much easier.

This spec is very useful in a fairy tale world where everyone wants to help tech giants build better AI models, but also when the goal is to twist the truth rather than improve reliability.

Oh, and I guess projects like Wikipedia are interested in easy information distribution like this. But you can just download a copy of the entire database instead.

And a bank account number to send it to!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com