- The problem of AI content harvesters crawling large amounts of data on the Internet is noticed, and website owners have to block access to these harvesters by updating their robots.
- It highlights that with the rapid advancement of AI technology, website owners are faced with the challenge of constantly updating their website rules to cope with the emerging crawlers.
OUR TAKES
The article focuses on the problem of AI content harvesters crawling large amounts of data on the Internet and how website owners can block access to these harvesters by updating their robots.txt files. At the same time, the article highlights that with the rapid advancement of AI technology, website owners are faced with the challenge of constantly updating their website rules to cope with the emerging crawlers.
-Rae Li, BTW reporter
What happened
Anthropic’s ClaudeBot, a web content crawler used to train AI models, recently visits the tech advice site iFixit.com about a million times in a 24-hour period. IFixit‘s CEO, Kyle Wiens, complains about the uninvited crawler visits on social media, noting that not only did they use the site’s content for no cost, but they also tie up development O&M resources and violated iFixit’s terms of service. Wiens wards off some of the traffic by adding a banning directive to the site’s robots.txt file, a recognised mechanism in the tech industry for blocking crawlers.
With the rapid development of AI technology, more and more AI companies have begun to use crawlers to collect data from their websites, making it difficult for website owners to update their files in time to deal with emerging crawlers. For example, Anthropic previously used Claude-Web and Anthropic-AI to collect training data, and ClaudeBot continued to appear even after the site had banned these crawlers. Thus, a lot of services such as Dark Visitors provide a programmatic method of automatically updating robots.txt entries to help site owners cope with the ever-changing crawler ecology.
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Why it’s important
With the rapid development of AI technology, more and more companies and research organisations are using automated tools to collect web data to train and improve their AI models. While this behaviour is common in technology development and research, it has also sparked discussions about data privacy, copyright and misuse of website resources.
Heavy access to AI content harvesters may interfere with the normal operation of websites, consume server resources, and affect user experience. Website owners need to keep their robots.txt files updated to prevent access by crawlers, which requires a certain level of technical knowledge and resources and can be a challenge for smaller websites. As AI technology continues to advance, new strategies and tools are needed to protect websites from inappropriate data harvesting practices while ensuring a healthy online environment. This is not only in the interest of website owners, but also in the balance and sustainability of the entire Internet ecosystem.
