Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 9 hours agoBut a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.
Oh fuck off with that AI company propaganda.
The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It’s the same fucking thing.
Web crawlers for search engines don’t scrape pages every time a user searches like AI does. Both web crawlers and scrapers are bots, and how a human initiates their operation, scheduled or not, doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they do things very differently and only one of the two respects robots.txt.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
There’s no difference in server load between a user looking at a page and a user using an AI tool to summarize the page.
You either didn’t read the article or are deliberately making bad faith arguments. The entire point of the article is that the traffic that they’re referring to is initiated by a user, just like when you type an address into your browser’s address bar.
This traffic, initiated by a user, creates the same server load as that same user loading the page in a browser.
Yes, mass scraping of web pages creates a bunch of server load. This was the case before AI was even a thing.
This situation is like Cloudflare presenting was a captcha in order to load each individual image, css or JavaScript asset into a web browser because bot traffic pretends to be a browser.
I don’t think it’s too hard to understand that a bot pretending to be a browser and a human operated browser are two completely different things and classifying them as the same (and captchaing them) would be a classification error.
This is exactly the same kind of error. Even if you personally believe that users using AI tools should be blocked, not everyone has the same opinion. If Cloudflare can’t distinguish between bot requests and human requests then their customers can’t opt out and allow their users to use AI tools even if they want to.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
There is no difference between emptying a glass of water and draining swimming pool either if you ignore the total volume of water.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I, too, can make any argument sound silly if I want to argue in bad faith.
A user cannot physically generate as much traffic as a bot.
Just like a glass of water cannot possibly contain as much water as a swimming pool, so pretending the two are equal is ignorant in both cases.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
You are so close to getting it!