NOIMAGEAI and NOAI meta tags: Performative BS?

General
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A few months ago, DeviantArt got into some controversy over their hosted works being including in AI datasets. In response, they did a blog post.

Their solution to the problem is a one-two punch of imagination, backed by policy.

The imagination bit is, they are adding these meta tags to their heads of their pages, and encouraging developers to do the same.

<meta name="robots" content="noimageai" />
<meta name="robots" content="noai" />

It sure is code. But it means absolutely nothing, and does absolutely nothing. The ā€œnoimageaiā€ and ā€œnoaiā€ tags do nothing, because DeviantArt just made them up; they are not a part of any official specification.

The only real meaning they have is defined in their policy, where they state:

In order to remain in compliance with DeviantArtā€™s updated Terms of Service, third parties that continue to use DeviantArt-sourced content to train machine-learning models of any kind must ensure their training data set excludes all content for which either of these directives are present.

Is anyone at all really worried about violating DeviantArtā€™s terms of service?

Scraping the Internet for data tends to be fairly anonymous, and I sincerely doubt DeviantArt will invest money to follow up on any known infringements with legal action. So, I reckon this is all toothless and performative.

All of this said, I am adding these tags to both Pangolin and Kookaburra in our next update. There is no harm whatsoever including meta tags on pages, nor in politely asking the robots to move along. And if thereā€™s enough groundswell around using them, maybe these tags will actually become recognized by those wanting to ethically source their datasets.

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Having two separate robots meta tags is technically incorrect ā€” the second one can override the first in some crawlers. Combine them into one:

FWIW, I prefer this directive wasnā€™t there.

Kookaburra Roadmap
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Added to my roadmap to revisit.

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If and when you want to revisit SEO, feel free to reach out to me as I have been doing some extensive research of late and have come up with a few mods for the custom plugin. Iā€™d give that to you now, but Iā€™m not quite finished and the results of what I am doing wonā€™t be available until late September.

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Honestly, I will probably forget to reach out. However, when you have something ready to share, let me know. Iā€™ll either be able to get into it immediately, or peg it to the roadmap for later.

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Changes incoming whenever our next update lands.

The conventions around this stuff have evolved in recent months, so Iā€™m updating Pangolin and Kookaburra templates to keep pace. IPTC has put out best-practice guidance on this, and it sounds like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all acknowledging the tags now. Still not a hard block, and not every crawler will respect it, but itā€™s maybe less wild-west than it was.

And because folks are sure to have varying feelings about all of this, Iā€™m introducing more granular control over which tags get applied to your templates. The new options in templates:

Prevent AI training with ā€˜noaiā€™ and ā€˜noimageaiā€™

- Ask AI crawlers not to use this pageā€™s content or images to train generative AI models. This is a voluntary, publisher-requested signal (recognized by some, not all, AI crawlers) rather than an enforceable block.

  • ON by default

Prevent search indexing with ā€˜noindexā€™

- You can prevent a page from appearing in search results by including a noindex meta tag in the pageā€™s HTML code; read more.

  • OFF by default

Prevent search result previews with ā€˜nosnippetā€™

- Prevents search engines from showing a text preview or thumbnail for this page in search results. This affects all search engines, not just AI crawlers, and may reduce click-through rates.

  • OFF by default

If a page is password protected, all of these will be forced to ON for that page.

As for how these are implemented at the code level, your preferences will be used to build a single meta tag for robots, for example, if all three options are ON:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noai, noimageai" />
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