The robots.txt is pretty explicit that this scraping is "disallowed"
https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt
So legalities aside, this seems unethical.
https://www.goodreads.com/robots.txt
So legalities aside, this seems unethical.
This obsession with "everything must be commercialized" is really killing creativity.
Now if the author was commercializing other peoples reviews, sure, it's potentially(!) unethical. But scraping a website for reviews that are publicly(!) posted, training a recommendation LLM and then sharing it, for free, seems ... exactly the ideal use case for this technology.
Stabbing people with swords is evil, unless they are so big that to them it's at worst a light poke with a fork
At the same time, everything you ever posted online has already been scraped by hundreds (maybe thousands) of entities and distributed/sold to countless other entities. The only difference is that OP shared his project here.
Blindly violating it is bad manners, but deliberately scraping a single website over a month isn't the worst.