The Consensus is Changing and Web Sites View LLMs as Evil, a Malicious Force of Plagiarism and a Source of DDoS
A language model? Or misuse/misapplication of "fair use" for mass plagiarism (with no quality standards)?
I was approached by E-mail this past Thursday under the subject line "News Consumers Disrupted by AI Data Scrapers–Expert Avail. On Solutions" (maybe they read Techrights).
It's not about "AI" but about plagiarism of sorts. They carelessly harvest other people's work and overwhelm public sites while doing so. It has gotten so bad that for the first time in years, yesterday I saw publicdomainpictures.net needing JS. It got so bad that was hiding behind CAPTCHA. Not good.
One associate has just told me that manton.org "wrongly asserts that Wikipedia is not under copyright" in "AI crawling reprise". The site says: "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply."
We already wrote about this Wikipedia problem and so did TechDirt. Quoting Wikipedia itself ("How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects":
Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.
This is what the mindless hype has led to; it is indistinguishable from vandalism. Who's responsible for this? Well, Twitter blamed Microsoft some years ago. It said that Microsoft and its proxies had been hammering the site, causing technical problems, costing it a lot of money, and slowing everything down (for legitimate users).
The "AI" hype is coming to an end, judging by reports that Microsoft is trying hard to distract from (e.g. Microsoft “slowing or pausing” its early-stage datacentre projects). Intel Corp fell from over 50 dollars to under 18 dollars in just over a year. "AI PCs" did not sell. They flopped.
Perhaps one day in the future - maybe a year or two from now - we'll look back at all this very expensive nonsense and a wrecked economy. We'll publish several leaks related to this later today. █
"The reason is that Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you." - Jamie Zawinski