Even more oddities spotted in the news

[robkelk]

A couple of articles about AI, bith from The Register.


First, Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

The network-taming company built the tool after noticing that almost one percent of all requests to access web content that it can see now come from AI crawler bots. Those bots are probably scraping data that’s gathered up to train AI models.

Web site operators can in theory block AI crawlers using various means such as a robots.txt file or changing web server settings to disallow visits from bots. Some even use CAPTCHAs to test whether visitors to a site are human, or adopt software designed to stymie bots.

In reality crawler operators ignore the instructions in robots.txt files, or work around CAPTCHAs and web server settings. The result is a lot of unwanted crawler traffic consuming resources, and info fed into training data without creators’ permission – a contentious practice currently being tested in court amidst allegations of copyright abuse.

Cloudflare’s response is to let crawler bots in and use generative AI to create junk content for them to devour in what the company has termed an “AI Labyrinth”.

fight fire with fire, fight AI with Ai.


Second, Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has affirmed a lower court ruling that content created by an AI model without human input cannot be copyrighted.

Nothing new in the way of US copyright law. The plaintiff intends to appeal.