platform announced Patreonwhich specializes in supporting creators through subscriptions, has begun taking stricter measures to prevent artificial intelligence bots from collecting their content and using it to train artificial intelligence models without permission.
The company said it is cooperating with the Internet infrastructure provider cloudflare To implement a direct blocking system for AI bots designed to mine creators’ work for the purpose of training models.
Patreon explained that this step came after the development of artificial intelligence data collection techniques, compared to the previous procedures it adopted in 2023, which were limited to informing crawlers not to use the content via a file. robots.txta standard that allows sites to determine how robots treat their pages.
The company added that the paid subscriptions and protection system originally limited the access of many creators’ content to search robots, but the launch of new discovery features such as the redesigned home page and the Quips Similar to short posts, make more of the content available to crawlers.
Under the new procedures, Patreon uses technology AI Crawl Control Cloudflare has updated its security policies, moving from simply asking AI bots not to collect content to actually blocking them from accessing it.
The company said in a statement that “approval for the use of content should not depend on whether the data collection program chooses to respect the rules or not,” noting that tests showed that attempts to reach some artificial intelligence training robots decreased from thousands of attempts per week to zero.
Patreon believes that these results indicate that some crawlers were ignoring the site’s instructions and continuing to collect data despite previous requests.
In return, the platform confirmed that it will allow robots that index pages and organize information that helps users return to Patreon content.
The company’s product manager, Drew Rooney, said that creators should have a real role in determining how their work is used by AI companies, stressing that the platform wants to give them the ability to grow their audience while maintaining control over the use of their content.
