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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

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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.

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[–] cbarrick@lemmy.world 72 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

This comment is copyrighted by me and licensed to the public under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you intend to use this comment for commercial purposes, you must secure a commercial license from me, which will cost you a lot of money. If you violate the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 without securing an appropriate license, I will send my army of lawyers that I totally definitely have to defend my copyright against you in court.

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 40 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Exactly, I never understood what people thought they would achieve by putting the link to that in their comments. Like, AI firms are absolutely willing to skim through copyrighted works of artists, backed by a much stronger license, what makes you think linking that will achieve anything. Except maybe poisoning the LLM well.
Hey, there's a thought. If we all just put that at the end of every comment, I wonder if GPT6 will figure that's just how people talk and end all it's responses with it?

[–] Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They figure no one person will have the means to sue or the ability to prove that their data was scraped.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago

Could we take em to small claims for like $500 a comment? That would be a devastating movement lol

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