Huge thank you to Squarespace for fucking automatically opting peoples' websites in to let AI train on our site's data without letting us know. Real cool.
ARTISTS WHO USE SQUARESPACE, HERE'S HOW TO DISABLE AI CRAWLERS ON YOUR SITE!!
That’s real dirty, squarespace.
It's not dirty. It, in fact, makes total sense.
You can't outright ban webcrawlers without banning normal users too. What you can do is write a file called "robots.txt" that politely asks webcrawlers not to look in certain files or directories. It's a request is all. This is pretty much standard on the web, and you should read more about it (wikipedia) if you run a website.
So what squarespace did is they wrote up a robots.txt policy targeting AI webcrawlers. They can't guarantee that their users want that, so they did the next best thing, which is to set the toggle to parity with how your user experience was before they added it.
They're not "opting you in". You opted yourself in when you made a website. They're just finally giving you the option to opt yourself out. How should they notify you that they added this option? They probably put it in their update notes, where it goes. After all, it's not changing anything to leave it alone.
Important info addition from someone who knows more about how websites work than I do (you should still opt out if you don't want ai picking over your shit, but good to know that having the option to is a step in the right direction)