but yeah the issue is that as long as you have something accessible to the public, it's ultimately your responsibility to deal with malicious/aggressive traffic
> At some point impacting my services with your business behavior goes from "it's just the internet being the internet" to willfully malicious.
I think maybe the current AI scraper traffic patterns are actually what "the internet being the internet" is from here forward
Kinda my point was that it's only the internet being the internet if we tolerate it. If enough people give a crap, the corporations doing it will have to knock it off.
if you wanna rage against the machine then more power to you but this line of thinking is dead on arrival in terms of outcome
I don't know that LLMs read sites. I only know when I use one it tells me it's checking site X, Y, Z, thinking about the results, checking sites A, B, C etc.... I assumed it was actually reading the site on my behalf and not just referring to its internal training knowledge.
Like how people are training LLMs, and how often does each one scrap? From the outside, it feels like the big ones (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc..) scrape only a few times a year at most.
Also to be clear I doubt those big guys are doing these crawls. I assume it's small startups who think they're gonna build a big dataset to sell or to train their own model.
Also, they might share the common viewpoint of "it's the internet; suck it up."
Background scanner noise on the internet is incredibly common, but the AI scraping is not at the same level. Wikipedia has published that their infrastructure costs have notably shot up since LLMs started scraping them. I've seen similar idiotic behavior on a small wiki I run; a single AI company took the data usage from "who gives a crap" to "this is approaching the point where I'm not willing to pay to keep this site up." Businesses can "just" pass the costs onto the customers (which is pretty shit at the end of the day,) but a lot of privately run and open source sites are now having to deal with side crap that isn't relevant to their focus.
The botnets and DDOS groups that are doing mass scanning and testing are targeted by law enforcement and eventually (hopefully) taken down, because what they're doing is acknowledged as bad.
AI companies, however, are trying to make a profit off of this bad behavior and we're expected to be okay with it? At some point impacting my services with your business behavior goes from "it's just the internet being the internet" to willfully malicious.