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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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[–] balder1991@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

It’s just how machine learning has been since ever.

We only know the model’s behavior by testing, hence we only know more or less the behavior in relation to the amount of testing that was done. But the model internals has always been a black box of numbers that individually mean nothing and if tracked which neurons fire here and there it’ll appear just random, because it probably is.

Remember the machine learning models aren’t carefully designed, they’re just brute-force trained for a long time and have the numbers adjusted again and again whenever the results look closer or further away from the desired output.