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Problem one is they do not honor the conventions of the web and abuse the sites. Problem two is they are taking content for free, distilling it into a product,
by epc 1y ago
Problem one is they do not honor the conventions of the web and abuse the sites.
Problem two is they are taking content for free, distilling it into a product, and limiting access to that product.
- wvenable 1y agoProblem one is not specific to AI and not even about AI. Problem two is not anything new. Taking freely available content and distilling it into a product is something valuable and potentially worth paying for. People used to buy encyclopedias too. There are countless examples.
- Symbiote 1y agoAt present, problem one is almost entirely AI companies.
- wvenable 1y agoAnd a few decades ago, it would have been search engine scrapers instead.
- not2b 1y agoAnd that problem was largely solved by robots.txt. AI scrapers are ignoring robots.txt and beating the hell out of sites. Small sites that have decades worth of quality information are suffering the most. Many of the scrapers are taking extreme measures to avoid being blocked, like using large numbers of distinct IP addresses (perhaps using botnets).
- immibis 1y agoThere's actually not much evidence of this, since the attack traffic is anonymous.
- Symbiote 1y agoHN people working in these AI companies have commented to say they do this, and the timing correlates with the rise of AI companies/funding. I haven't tried to find it in my own logs, but others have said blocking an identifiable AI bot soon led to the same pattern of requests continuing through a botnet.
- lostmsu 1y agoDid HN people present evidence?
- amiga386 1y agoProblem one _is_ about AI. It was a similar problem with cryptocurrencies. Out comes some kind of tech thingy, and a million get-rich-quick scammers pop out of the woodwork and start scamming left, right and center. Suddenly everyone's in on the hustle, everyone's cryptomining, or taking over computers and using them for cryptomining, they're setting the world on fire with electricity consumption through the roof just to fight against other people (who they wouldn't need to fight against if they'd just cooperate). A vision. A gold rush. A massive increase in shitty human behaviour motivated by greed. And now here we are again with AI. Massive interest. Trillions of dollars being sloshed around, everyone hustling to develop something so they'll get picked and flooded with cash. An enormous pile of deeply unethical and disrespectful behaviour by people who are doing what they're doing because that's where the money is. The AI bubble.