Hey RoWers,
As a staff team, we need to address an important epidemic striking our community: artificial intelligence. We were recently notified that there is (at least) one person actively scraping RP sites to train their large language models in the hopes of developing an AI to RP. Specifically, wolf sites like ours, Canis, Ardent, and others have been targeted for 'xenomorphic fiction material.' Based on the messages shared with us, it appears they are trying to create some sort of AI to RP with; however, whether or not they intended to use it for a monetized effort remains unclear. Currently, we are operating under the assumption that it is for financial gain. Ruins of Wildwood was one of the targets of their scrapes. Coincidentally, these scrapes aligned with the increased bot activity that was taxing our CPU and causing the site to crash. We thought it was outdated code, and in part, it was, and we are continuing to push forward with our modernization effort. However, it was also a designated scraping assignment against our site. Their bots crashed our site by flooding it in what can only be described as an 'accidental DDoS' effort.We would like to thank the staff at Canis for looking out for the entire community by informing us and several other sites about these efforts. It's genuinely heartwarming to see the broader wolf community come together in this way. It would likely have gone unnoticed if not for the fact that Canis had already locked down their forums, and the specific developer had reached out to them requesting access to the 33,000 IC posts they had locked.
Staff is currently working on attempting to remove the scraped data from any corpora to which it has been added, utilizing the avenues available to us, including GDPR, as we have users from European Union countries and intellectual property laws. As AI continues to grow, we knew this kind of fight would be inevitable, but we thought we had a little more time due to the niche nature of our collective work. We have not yet ascertained the exact amount taken, but we are working under the assumption that they have taken all 156k+ of our in-character posts.
In light of this, we have locked down all archives, IC, and library forums. This means you must be logged in to view any threads. Similarly, our OOC archives, as well as our art studios and character profiles, were already locked down, requiring an approved account to view them. This should prevent further scraping as bots will only be able to scrape the 'No Permissions Page' whenever they try to access these forums.
We love and support you all and take our collective intellectual property in the form of our characters, stories, and writing styles seriously. We hope for the best possible outcome as the 'AI race' becomes increasingly oppressive to creative entities like writers and artists.
