The author also expresses skepticism about the supposed societal benefits of these practices, suggesting that they primarily serve to inflate company valuations while producing chat bots and image generators that are often problematic. They encourage website owners to block AI crawlers and question whether these companies will respect standard tools like 'robots.txt'. The author concludes by providing a list of AI crawlers they have blocked on their own website.
Key takeaways:
- AI companies are using web crawling to improve their models and products, a process that benefits the companies but not the owners of the websites being crawled.
- The New York Times has blocked OpenAI's web crawler, preventing it from using the publication's content to train its AI models.
- There is a growing trend to block AI crawlers, with resources like Dark Visitors providing lists of such crawlers.
- The author expresses skepticism about the supposed societal benefits of AI and questions the ethics of companies using data they didn't create.