Technology

59296 readers

4165 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

343

OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content (archive.ph)

submitted 4 months ago by IndustryStandard@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned.

OpenAI and Anthropic have been found to be either ignoring or circumventing an established web rule, called robots.txt, that prevents automated scraping of websites.

TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, found several AI companies are acting in this way and informed certain large publishers in a Friday letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters. The letter did not include the names of any of the AI companies accused of skirting the rule.

OpenAI and Anthropic have stated publicly that they respect robots.txt and blocks to their specific web crawlers, GPTBot and ClaudeBot.

However, according to TollBit's findings, such blocks are not being respected, as claimed. AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are simply choosing to "bypass" robots.txt in order to retrieve or scrape all of the content from a given website or page.

A spokeswoman for OpenAI declined to comment beyond pointing BI to a corporate blogpost from May, in which the company says it takes web crawler permissions "into account each time we train a new model." A spokesperson for Anthropic did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Robots.txt is a single bit of code that's been used since the late 1990s as a way for websites to tell bot crawlers they don't want their data scraped and collected. It was widely accepted as one of the unofficial rules supporting the web.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies.

If we can't scrape data freely, it instantly kills the open source scene. These regulation only benefit companies like OpenAi and Google, who will happily pay an exorbitant price to have exclusive rights on data they don't already own and get a monopoly in return, as well as the companies who own this data like Reddit, Getty, Adobe, etc.

Getting a dime was never in the cards for individuals except maybe the outliers like GRR who can throw their weight around.

Almost all regulation being proposed only benefit big AI companies and are meant to kill any competition. They are flooding the media with bad sentiment articles to manipulate people so they can tell congress their constituents want this.

[–] Gutless2615@ttrpg.network 5 points 4 months ago

Voice of reason

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago

Exactly.

If you can't train using public, copyrighted material, Disney has a hell of a model and their monopoly over the entertainment industry goes from huge to insurmountable. No "little guys" gain anything. It's regulatory capture, nothing more.