Opt-outs that Work in the World of AI Data Scraping

Spawning argues that AI training opt-outs must be registered and checked at the level of individual media URLs, at training time, across multiple machine-readable methods, because robots.txt alone leaves gaps. The article explains that scrapers download media directly from host servers, so a page's robots.txt is usually not read at training time, and a URL in a dataset such as LAION-5B may later return different content. It describes Spawning's Do Not Train Registry, which is delivered in batches through the Spawning API at scraping time, and its Data Diligence package, which checks for multiple opt-out methods during media download.