Fuck AI

Trying to prevent bits from being copied is always going to be futile.

In the long-ago times, websites that didn't want crawlers to scrape them had a /robots.txt file that described what was and wasn't allowed to be scraped.

But, the AI companies completely ignore that file. In fact, if anything, they may use it to find the "juicier" stuff to scrape. I know plenty of people who have decades of experience in running web servers who are going to extreme lengths (like banning entire countries, or huge IP ranges) to prevent what amounts to a DDOS on their servers from AI-company scrapers, because anything less extreme than that doesn't work. For some of these people, more than 90% of the traffic they get is from AI scrapers. In fact, it seems like if you try to do something to discourage scrapers from AI companies, they think there's something even juicier there and work even harder to get at it.

If they can find it, they'll ingest it. And, these companies have spent literal billions on working around any attempt to prevent them from ingesting things, because they believe that whichever company manages to ingest the most content will come up with the best model.

If you have some kind of moral exception to your work ever ending up in an LLM, then you're really out of luck. You better take up oil painting and never allow pictures of your art to be taken. The slop machines are hungry, and anything that becomes bits and ends up online will eventually be scraped.

As for making money as an artist, that's another matter. It has always been hard, now it's even harder. I don't think you'll make it easier for yourself by trying to prevent your stuff from being scraped. That just adds extra headaches you don't need.