Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes:
The bots steal, do not give attribution, and make it less likely that people will head to Wikipedia. I might not be Wikipedia’s biggest fan, but what’s worse is when people pinch their content and can’t do so within what are already very generous licensing terms.
And these days, you can’t even DMCA successfully, as I’ve found. One recent report to Google saw them reply and acknowledged there was pirated content, but their March 6 claim it would be removed ‘soon’ is yet to be realized. Automattic has also failed to remove blatantly pirated content reported under their DMCA procedure. These big US tech firms have become even more dishonest under this second Trump presidency (in Google’s case, you wonder if that was even possible), but they wanted their guy in there to do their bidding and their dream has come true. As they don’t want to trade with anyone outside their country, I imagine they have no real motive to do right to overseas companies even by their own terms and conditions. You just can’t trust them—and this blog has been filled with examples from the US.
Casey’s full article (paywalled) is on Platformer.
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