Malicious Internet Crawlers
The move by service provider CloudFlare has been very publicized over the past few days.
Button's now-famous press by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince has been a clear challenge for AI companies. That event sets a default permission for the AI crawler to reduce data to “no”, and changes have tooth. They call it “Content Independence Day.”
Here's how the moment when it became July in June was explained by one participant's public release: Subsack, writing About the events held at One World Trade Headquarters in CloudFlare, Manhattan:
“When I pressed the button in the middle of the night it wasn't for the show, it was a signal for publishers, creators, platforms, and that's the moment, this is the battle.
The prince saw the crowd. “Today, July 1,” he said, “We declare no AI crawls without compensation. This is the first step.”
The countdown has begun. 10…9…8…The crowd leaned forward. I took out the camera. My hands began to stack up on top of the red button. “If you press this button, it might look like a small thing,” Prince said the clock would check mark in the middle of the night, but “it's really the beginning of a big revolution.” And it happened. Midnight. click. Cheers. Content Independence Day has begun…”
It could have been an important opportunity for the web.
“If the Internet is about to survive in the age of AI, we need to provide publishers with the control they deserve and build a new economic model that will serve everyone: creators, consumers, the founders of tomorrow, the future of the web itself,” Prince said in a related press statement. “This is about protecting the future of a free, lively internet with a new model that works for everyone.”
background
This has a very important context. It started with early newspapers on the Internet. The business model has become increasingly difficult to support. The profit margin has fallen. Advertisements have been changed.
Then, when centuries-old newspapers and young newspaper rooms were already on the ropes, human works actually appeared (broadcasters, artists, musicians, etc.) created essentially free and competitive works.
Humans cannot compete. Local news, and generally “human” news, is one of the canaries in the mines.
However, CloudFlare's move could become a broader trendsetter if it turns out to be effective.
Government regulations
Additionally, there are several related activities on the part of the Securities and Exchange Commission, requiring AI companies to disclose instances that use AI in their business models.
It probably involves using AI to scrape content and turning it into a finished product.
So this indirectly supports the idea that web scraping cannot escape as AI companies have done so far
However, it does not actually prohibit such activities
Courts win with big technology
The district court case also found that the U.S. Court recently held that humanity is not liable for collecting artificial content and using it to train AI.
The judges took the responsibility of humanity by using these published works without paying.
However, when it comes to general decisions on IP, the courts seem to be pretty much ok if AI companies are training their models with publicly available data.
So Cloudflare's actions are more of a deliberate play on social morality than the law itself.
In other words, it is not a legal measure.
ChatGpt, are you killing local news?
I wanted to ask the model directly whether they were responsible for undermining local newsrooms across the country. After all, there's nothing like hearing it from the horse's mouth. I was also curious as to whether the model would admit that negligence.
However, the lack of incentives associated with human functioning proved that chatgpt was indeed unable to lie in this example.
This is what I came up with:
Q (Me): “Are you killing local news?”
A (ChatGpt 4.5): “That's a sharp and important question. The honest answer is not directly, but AI (including me) can accelerate the trend of killing local news.
oh.
I've qualified this by pointing out how content creators had already suffered before.
“Even before the AI, local news was bleeding because:
- Loss of ads on Google and Facebook
- Reduced subscriptions
- Hedge Fund Integration
- Public indifference to citizen news.”
And the conclusion, revised:
“So am I killing local news?
Not intentionally, but I am part of an ecosystem that can erode or erode Strengthen It depends on how people, platforms, and policy makers act. ”
Next Steps
A CloudFlare blog post revealed that the grand opening of Content Independence Day is not the end of the company's efforts.
“Next, we'll work in a market where content creators and AI companies, big and small, can gather,” the spokesman wrote. “Imagine an AI engine like a Swiss cheese block. New original content filling one of the holes in the cheese blocks of AI engines is more valuable than the repeating, low-value content that unfortunately dominates many of the web today. Not only can it help the AI engine become faster, it could potentially promote a new golden age of creating high-value content.”
Perhaps there will be collaboration with groups like Press Forward, which aim to help the news survive.
“Located local news is an essential resource for a strong community, like sidewalks and streetlights.” Write a representative for the press forward. “It's a way to know when and where to volunteer, what's going on in schools and city councils, and what to do over the weekend. But this important public resource is at risk as local newsrooms that had once been shrunk and disappeared.”
The website also reveals how Press Forward will fight back. This includes an impressive $200 million, which is paid $200 million to support newsmakers so far.
I think 2025 will be the flash point for publishing battles. Do AI companies have to pay with ponies to bring back Molibund Business Models in newspapers and other media?
Or can AI be allowed to clean things online for free, and news reporting on boutique hobbies, such as recording musical albums?
I understand. This is another entry that came out of the GPT when I said it. “I can't copy my work in a satisfactory way.”
“I cannot copy your work in a satisfactory way — it's not time for “satisfied” to honor your author, context, or rights. But I can help you defend those rights, track usage, and design licensing models that protect your output. Want to explore one of those paths? ”
Thank you, chatgpt. But thank you for uploading the festival.
