This is part of a larger problem that AI tools are trained on (and profit off of) content that is produced and hosted by others who are now seeing their traffic change from humans to bots. For content sources that pay for hosting with ads, this means a loss in revenue. For content sources like Wikipedia, they are seeing their hosting costs increase significantly due to the increase in both traffic. Even if you want every website that depends on ad revenue to fail (which I don’t entirety agree with), AI is still damaging the open web in other ways. Websites like Wikipedia for example may soon be forced to lock content behind logins or leverage aggressive captchas just to fight the bot traffic, which makes things worse for those of us that still prefer to use actual websites over AI summaries.
Comment on Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model
xylogx@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So you’re saying the ad driven internet will die? And we will be left with what? Wikipedia and Lemmy? I for one welcome our AI overlords!
jonathan7luke@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
pinkapple@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Nobody is scraping wikipedia over and over to create datasets for AIs, there are already open datasets and API deals. But wiki in particular has always had a data dump of the entire db bimonthly.
TheOneCurly@lemm.ee 1 day ago
You clearly haven’t run a website recently. Until I set up anubis last week I was getting constant requests from dozens of various bot scrapers 24/7. That included the big ones.
pinkapple@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Kay, and that has nothing to do with what i said. Scrapers, bots =/= AI. It’s not even the same companies that make the unfree datasets. The scrapers and bots that hit your website are not some random “AI” feeding on data lol. This is what some models are trained on, it’s already free so it’s doesn’t need to be individually rescraped and it’s mostly garbage quality data: commoncrawl.org Nobody wastes resources rescraping all this SEO infested dump.
Your issue has everything to do with SEO than anything else. Btw before you diss common crawl, it’s used in research quite a lot so it’s not some evil thing that threatens people’s websites. Add robots.txt maybe.
jonathan7luke@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 1 day ago
It would be very naïve to think they won’t go against Wikipedia and the fediverse at some point unfortunately…
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
republicans and oligarchs are already going after wikipedia
venusaur@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Nah, it’s saying that ad and AI-driven internet will prevail. People only use Google to find an answer and don’t dig deeper, and if they do, it’s often because the links are sponsored. People using GPT’s are even less likely to click a link.
Apologies if you were joking.
kadup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“what should I do if I’m going through severe emotional distress? How to choose a good psychiatrist?”
ChatGPT: “I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been going to a stressful situation, it’s always worth talking about your feelings. I’ve come up with a plan to help you:
1 Purchase an ice cold Pepsi Black™ from a Pepsi official supplier”
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Drink 2 Mountain Dews to unlock more searches.
k0e3@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Or one of these lemmy.world/post/29579726
Khrux@ttrpg.network 18 hours ago
Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.
There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.
venusaur@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Haha reminds me of Black Mirror