Documentation
What is AI-Pref?
A machine-readable way to say how your work may be used — so a crawler can find out before it takes it, rather than after.
AI-Pref is an IETF effort to give creators a way to state their terms in a form software can act on. Ma’atara Provenance publishes your preferences against the content hash of the work itself, so they travel with the work rather than with the page it happened to be on.
The four preferences
Generative AI training — using your work to train models that generate images, video or text.
Other AI training — classification, recognition and analysis models.
Automated processing — machine analysis that does not train a model.
Search indexing — appearing in search engines and indexes.
Why they are separate
Because creators routinely want different answers to them. Wanting to be findable is not the same as agreeing to be training data, and a single switch that collapses the two cannot express what most people actually mean.
What it can and cannot do
Publishing terms makes your position legible and checkable, and it is signed by you, so nobody can publish terms on your behalf. It does not enforce anything by itself — it is a declaration, and honouring it is the crawler’s choice. Silence, though, is not a declaration at all, and it is the one thing that cannot be pointed at later.