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On Sat, 6 Jul, 12:02 AM UTC
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Cloudflare Enables Websites To Block AI Bots With One-Click Solution
A new problem for website owners in this era of artificial intelligence changing the digital landscape is AI bots scraping their content without permission. To address this growing concern, Cloudflare has introduced a feature that allows customers to block AI bots with just a single click. AI bots, also known as AI crawlers or scrapers, are automated programs designed to systematically browse the internet and collect vast amounts of data. Unlike traditional web crawlers used by search engines to index content, AI bots often gather information to train large language models or power AI-driven applications. While search engine crawlers typically follow established protocols like respecting robots.txt files and identifying themselves clearly, some AI bots may not adhere to these courtesies. The rise of generative AI has dramatically increased the demand for training data, making original web content more valuable than ever. This has led to concerns about the unauthorized use of copyrighted material, personal information and intellectual property. Notable incidents have highlighted these issues, such as Google's reported $60 million annual payment to license Reddit's user-generated content and allegations of AI companies using celebrity voices without permission. Recognizing the growing need for better control over AI bot access, Cloudflare has launched a new feature that allows customers to block all AI bots with a single click. This option is available to all Cloudflare users, including those on the free tier. To enable this protection, customers simply navigate to the Security section of the Cloudflare dashboard and toggle the "AI Scrapers and Crawlers" switch. This feature is designed to be dynamic, with Cloudflare continuously updating it to address new fingerprints of offending bots identified as widely scraping the web for model training. By leveraging its vast network, which processes an average of 57 million requests per second, Cloudflare can quickly detect and respond to emerging AI bot activities. Cloudflare's analysis of AI bot traffic across its network revealed some interesting insights: 1. The most active AI bots in terms of request volume are Bytespider, Amazonbot, ClaudeBot and GPTBot. 2. Bytespider, operated by ByteDance (TikTok's parent company), leads in both request volume and the extent of internet property crawling. 3. GPTBot, managed by OpenAI, ranks second in both crawling activity and frequency of being blocked by website owners. 4. Despite AI bots accessing 39% of the top one million internet properties using Cloudflare, only 2.98% of these properties actively block or challenge AI bot requests. 5. More popular websites are more likely to be targeted by AI bots and, correspondingly, more likely to implement blocking measures. One of the challenges in managing AI bot traffic is that some operators attempt to disguise their bots as legitimate web browsers by using spoofed user agents. Cloudflare has developed sophisticated machine learning models to identify these deceptive practices. Their global bot score system can accurately flag traffic from evasive AI bots, even when they change their user agents or employ other obfuscation techniques. Cloudflare's approach leverages global machine learning models and aggregates data across numerous indicators to understand the trustworthiness of various bot fingerprints. This allows them to detect new scraping tools and behaviors without needing to manually fingerprint each bot, ensuring that customers remain protected against the latest waves of bot activity. By providing this easy-to-use blocking feature, Cloudflare aims to empower website owners to maintain control over their content and decide how it may be used in AI training or applications. This move also sends a clear message to AI companies about the importance of respecting content creators' rights and obtaining proper permissions for data usage. Cloudflare has also introduced mechanisms for users to report misbehaving AI crawlers. Enterprise Bot Management customers can submit false negative feedback reports through Bot Analytics, while all Cloudflare customers can use a dedicated reporting tool to flag AI bots scraping their websites without permission. As AI technology continues to evolve, Cloudflare anticipates that some AI companies may persistently adapt their methods to evade detection. In response, Cloudflare is promising to continually update their AI Scrapers and Crawlers rules and refine their machine learning models. Their goal is to ensure that the internet remains a place where content creators can thrive and maintain full control over how their work is used in AI training and applications. This initiative by Cloudflare represents a significant step in the ongoing dialogue about AI ethics, data rights and the future of content creation in the digital age. By providing tools to manage AI bot access, Cloudflare is helping to shape a more transparent and consensual relationship between content creators and AI developers, potentially influencing the direction of AI development towards more responsible and ethical practices.
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Cloudflare's new free tool stops bots from scraping your website content to train AI
AI bots accessed around 39% of the top one million 'internet properties' using Cloudflare in June of 2024, according to the company. If you're worried about AI bots scraping your website content to train AI, Cloudflare can help you fight back. The company, which claims to proxy about 20% of the web, has introduced a new tool that blocks all AI bots from scraping a site's text. Cloudflare says the tool is available to all customers, even those on the free tier. Also: Do you still need to pay for antivirus software in 2024? With the rise in generative AI, companies need content to train chatbots. Many are turning to web scrapers that pull text from sites for analysis (like ChatGPT is doing with your Reddit posts). Some companies are upfront and honest about web-scraping bots, but some aren't. Cloudflare released a feature last September for users to block "bad" AI web crawlers, or ones that scrape sites without permission. Naturally, some companies found a way around this by having scrapers that pretend to be authentic ones. That's why this new tool blocks all AI crawlers, even ones that follow proper protocol for scraping. For June 2024, AI bots accessed around 39% of the top one million "internet properties" using Cloudflare, the company said. Less than 3% of those properties took measures to block AI bots. According to Cloudflare, the top four bots scraping its sites were Bytespider, Amazonbot, ClaudeBot, and GPTBot. Bytespider, owned by Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, is used to gather training data for its large language models, including ChatGPT rival Doubao. Amazonbot is used to train the question-answering side of Alexa, ClaudeBot trains Claude AI, and GPTBot trains ChatGPT. Also: 5 ways Amazon can make an AI-powered Alexa subscription worth the cost If you're a Cloudflare user, using the tool is simple. Just head to the settings section of your dashboard, then click "Security" and "Bots." From there, you'll see a toggle button labeled "AI Scrapers and Crawlers." Turn it on, and AI bots will no longer have access to your content. Of course, AI bots are constantly evolving. Cloudflare says this feature will automatically evolve too as it detects the "fingerprints" of offending bots. The new tool is available now for all Cloudflare users starting today.
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Cloudflare launches war on Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI bots with comprehensive free tool to block all crawlers - ExBulletin
What you need to knowCloudflare is a global cloud provider that provides security and DDoS protection for millions of websites, securing roughly 20% of the world's internet traffic. Yesterday, Cloudflare announced that it would be making a new free tool available to all customers specifically designed to block AI crawlers. AI bots used by many companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, steal copyrighted information from websites like ours to train their premium AI services. Last week, Microsoft's head of AI said that all publicly available internet content is "freeware" that is stolen for the company's AI ambitions. Last week, Microsoft's AI chief said that public content on the open web is "freeware," meaning trillion-dollar companies have free reign to steal any content users publish to the web and leverage it for premium products. The backlash from this gaffe was huge, and it served as a wake-up call for web content providers to reconsider their relationships with companies like Microsoft that seek to profit from the efforts of content creators while giving literally nothing in return. Cloudflare may have handed those same creators a crucial defensive weapon with which to fight back. Cloudflare is a global internet services and hosting company that serves approximately 20% of all web traffic. Offering services such as DDoS protection and bot validation checks for websites, Cloudflare uses its massive server infrastructure as a vast security layer for businesses of all shapes and sizes, helping to improve the overall quality of the World Wide Web. The company announced yesterday that it will begin rolling out new features designed to combat generative AI to all users, including free ones. To help keep the Internet safe for content creators, we launched a new "easy button" to block all AI bots. Available to all customers, including those on our free plan. For more information, see our blog post: https://t.co/csWFFgqbKMJuly 3, 2024 Cloudflare said in a blog post that it was declaring "AIndependence": its new system will allow users to opt-in to block AI bots and crawlers from accessing their websites, effectively preventing the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI from stealing web content for free. Cloudflare released data showing that after surveying its users, over 80% of customers want the ability to block content theft by Microsoft. "We heard loud and clear from our customers -- they don't want AI bots accessing their websites, especially illicit ones," Cloudflare said. "To help, we've added a brand new feature to block all AI bots with one click, available to all customers, including those on our free plan." Generative AI training content is becoming profitable and valuable to companies like Google and Microsoft. Google reportedly paid over $60 million for access to all of Reddit's content to train its models, with the amusing result that sarcasm and trolls are now appearing in Google search results. Microsoft Copilot is the company's best AI effort to date, and it's essentially Bing with an extra layer of functionality. (Image credit: Windows Central) Previously, I wrote that it would be in Google and Microsoft's interest to have a healthy, symbiotic relationship between human creators and generative AI efforts. While generative AI undoubtedly has a role to play in the future of technology, it feels like companies are still struggling with what that specifically means for their customers. Currently, generative AI seems to be most often used for the most basic writing tasks, such as composing formal emails or summarizing long pieces of text. Yet, upon closer inspection, even the basics are problematic. Given that we need to double-check everything the AI does to avoid AI "hallucinations," we found that it often only hurts productivity rather than improves it. The latest news, reviews and guides for Windows and Xbox enthusiasts. AI is also very expensive to operate. AI queries hurt Google's efforts to reduce emissions, and I don't think Microsoft is doing a very good job here either. Even ignoring the climate impact, this business model doesn't seem to work well today. Microsoft offers Copilot for free, but I don't see why you should pay for it. Related article: Why Microsoft won't be the company that brings AI to consumers A low-hanging fruit feature that Google and Microsoft quickly picked up on is search summaries. At Windows Central, we create thousands of guides, and Microsoft Copilot just takes our article content and replicates it, taking away our traffic and revenue. This is bad for us, but it's also bad for Microsoft and Google. When human content creators can no longer effectively monetize and make a living, more and more parts of the internet will be generated by AI. As with JPEG compression, content quality will suffer when AI starts to learn from other AIs instead of human creators. After all, AIs don't "understand" the content they replicate, they can only infer context by comparing it to human content. This phenomenon is called model collapse, and it's a real concern among serious AI scientists. But for now, all Google, Microsoft, and other companies are thinking about is moving forward. For this kind of technology to really take off, human intervention is still needed. The alarm stoked by Microsoft's AI chief's irresponsible "freeware" comments has only fueled an ongoing backlash. Now, with companies like Cloudflare joining the fight back, it won't be long before others follow suit, and Microsoft may have to seriously rethink its complacency towards industrial-scale content theft. 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Cloudflare has introduced a new free tool that allows websites to easily block AI bots from scraping their content with just one click. The tool aims to protect website owners' intellectual property from being used to train AI models without permission.
Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure and security company, has launched a new feature called Bot Fight Mode1. This free tool allows website owners to block AI bots from scraping their content with a single click2. The move comes as concerns grow over AI systems being trained on web data without the permission of content creators.
Many AI models, such as those powering chatbots and image generators, are trained on vast amounts of data scraped from websites. This has raised questions about the intellectual property rights of content creators3. With Bot Fight Mode, Cloudflare aims to give website owners more control over how their content is used.
When enabled, Bot Fight Mode automatically detects and blocks bots that are likely scraping a website to train AI systems1. It leverages Cloudflare's existing bot detection capabilities, which analyze bot behavior patterns. Legitimate bots, such as those from search engines, are still allowed to access the site.
The launch of Bot Fight Mode comes amid a growing debate over the use of web data to train AI models. While some argue that web scraping is fair use, others believe it infringes on creators' rights2. As AI becomes more prevalent, finding a balance between technological progress and protecting intellectual property will be crucial.
With Bot Fight Mode, Cloudflare has given website owners a powerful tool to assert control over their content in the age of AI. As the conversation around ethical AI training data evolves, more solutions like this may emerge to help safeguard creators' interests.
Reference
Cloudflare has introduced a new feature aimed at helping website owners block AI companies from scraping their sites. The tool allows site owners to easily restrict access to content-scraping bots.
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Cloudflare introduces AI Audit, a suite of tools designed to help website owners analyze and control how AI models use their content, potentially allowing content creators to monetize AI access to their work.
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An intense battle is underway to stop AI bots from spreading misinformation online. Researchers and tech companies are working to develop systems to detect and combat AI-generated fake content.
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Enterprises are increasingly blocking AI web crawlers due to performance issues, security threats, and content guideline violations. This trend highlights the growing tension between AI data collection and website integrity.
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AI companies are encountering difficulties as more data owners block access to their intellectual property for AI training. This trend is causing a significant reduction in available training data, potentially impacting AI development and capabilities.
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