A new kind of turf war is breaking out on the web, with AI bots battling other AI bots to seize or defend stockpiles of the AI era’s most valuable commodity: data.
The big picture: AI makers hungry for more data to train their language models are grabbing everything they can, while information owners are increasingly fighting fire with fire by turning to AI-powered tools to protect their intellectual property.
Driving the news: Cloudflare, the infrastructure and security firm used by 1 in 5 websites, introduced a new service last week that protects clients’ content from poaching by data-harvesting bots.
- “We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots,” Cloudflare said in a blog post.
Catch up quick: Since the ’90s, websites have used a simple file on their sites —called “robots.txt” — to […]
I’m not sure it will really play out this way. AI systems require significant electrical power to operate. As they grow in number and sophistication, the need for energy will multiply. There will be a natural limit. There may end up being a competition between the needs of biological humans for electrical power and corporations who want that electrical demand for themselves. That, I suspect, will be the major vector for conflict.
I know there is a new VERY FAST AI being used by Yugoslavia to shho the Russian ships to help them not get clobered by the Russions, and it IS WORKING.