Block the AI bots
A quick guide with information to block AI bots from scraping your website.
People have asked me how I block AI bots from scraping the art work on my site. I use 3 website based techniques.
First, I moved my portfolio website away from Adobe Portfolios since those websites offer zero protections from AI image scraping. In fact there was a time when Adobe was scraping portfolios and behance accounts as a way to train their Firefly Image generation AI. I’m not sure if they are still doing that since users made a big stink over it. Either way, I made damn sure to remove my art from their platform and placed it under my own control.
This unallowed scraping is also true of Instagram, Facebook, and X. If you want to avoid their nonsense, simply stop using the apps.
I created a wordpress based website as my portfolio on an webhost where I could control the all aspects of the hosting. I have a background in web development and I for me it wasn’t a hard thing to do, however I realize that for some folks this will present a technological hurdle to overcome.
Once I had the wordpress site set up I installed a security plugin that removes the capability to right click on all text and images. The provides a bit of safety against obvious image theft.To block the AI Bot scraping of my website I installed two files which you can download. The first is the robots.txt file, which provides a basic txt file with allow and disallow rules that bots can follow. The second file I installed is the ai.txt file. That has rules that block AI bots from scraping the site incase the bot decides not to follow the robots.txt file.
Place these text files in the top level of your public html folder.
For downlaod purposes here they are PDFs, but once you download theses files, copy the text in a plain text file and save it with the corresponding name. (robots.txt or ai.txt)The other thing to do to truly defeat AI image scraping is to run all your images through the Glaze app. Read here on how to use it and to download it.
I hope this short guide is useful in helping you to protect your artwork. If enough of us employ these tactics (along with copyrighting our work) then let’s hope we can stop this massive art theft.