We recognize that the balance between content owners and the users or developers accessing that content is delicate. Because of that, our initial stance is to default to respecting websites as much as possible.
That said, to be clear on our implementation: we currently only respond to explicit blocks directed at the Tabstack user agent. You can read more about how this works here: https://docs.tabstack.ai/trust/controlling-access
I think too often people fall completely on one side of this question or the other. I think it’s really complicated, and deserves a lot of nuance. I think it mostly comes down to having a right to exert control over how our data should be used, and I think most of it’s currently shaped by Section 230.
Generally speaking, platforms consider data to be owned by the platform. GDPR and CCPA/CPRA try to be the counter to that, but those are also too-crude a tool.
Let’s take an example: Reddit. Let’s say a user is asking for help and I post a solution that I’m proud of. In that act, I’m generally expecting to help the original person who asked the question, and since I’m aware that the post is public, I’m expecting it to help whoever comes next with the same question.
Now (correct me if I’m wrong, but) GDPR considers my public post to be my data. I’m allowed to request that Reddit return it to me or remove it from the website. But then with Reddit’s recent API policies, that data is also Reddit’s product. They’re selling access to it for … whatever purposes they outline in the use policy there. That’s pretty far outside what a user is thinking when they post on Reddit. And the other side of it as well — was my answer used to train a model that benefits from my writing and converts it into money for a model maker? (To name just an example).
I think ultimately, platforms have too much control, and users have too little specificity in declaring who should be allowed to use their content and for what purposes.
I'm afraid that Tabstack would be powerful enough to bypass some existing countermeasures against scrapers, and once allowed in its lightweight mode be used to scrape data it is not supposed to be allowed to. I'd bet that someone will at least try.
Then there is the issue of which actions and agent is allowed to do on behalf of a user. Many sites have in their Terms of Service that all actions must be by done directly by a human, or that all submitted content be human-generated and not from a bot. I'd suppose that an AI agent could find and interpret the ToS, but that is error-prone and not the proper level to do it at. Some kind of formal declaration of what is allowed is necessary: robots.txt is such a formal declaration, but very coarsely grained.
There have been several disparate proposals for formats and protocols that are "robots.txt but for AI". I've seen that at least one of them allow different rules for AI agents and machine learning. But these are too disparate, not widely known ... and completely ignored by scrapers anyway, so why bother.
At the end it's all about the impact on the servers, and those can be optimized, but this does not seem to happen at the moment at large. So in that regard, centralizing usage and honouring the rules is a good step, and the rest are details to figure out on the way.
If (for instance) my content changes often and I always want people to see an up-to-date version, the second option is clearly worse for me!
My apprehension is not with AI agents per se, it is the current, and likely future implementation: AI vendors selling the search and re-publication of other parties' content. In this relationship, neither option is great: either these providers are hammering your site on behalf of their subscribers' individual queries, or they are scraping and caching it, and reselling potentially stale information about you.
There are technical improvements to web standards that can and should be made that doesn't favor adtech and exploitative commercial interests over the functionality, freedom, and technically sound operation of the internet