How web scraping actually works - and why AI changes everything

ZD NET

AI scraping is parasitical behavior that's devastating website traffic. The AIs pull in information (like from this article) and then, instead of sending readers to the site where an author wrote the piece, simply present that information before anyone visits a site.

I wrote a lot about this phenomenon and some of the protections that are starting to be deployed in How AI companies are secretly collecting training data from the web (and why it matters). That will bring you up to speed on the issue in more depth.

Both search and AI use the results of absolutely ginormous scraping and spidering operations, but one provides benefits to the scrapees, while the other profits enormously from the work of others while simultaneously destroying their motivation to keep doing the work.

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