Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple's AI Scraping

https://www.wired.com/story/applebot-extended-apple-ai-scraping/

by thm • 2 years ago

86 83 2 years ago

josephd79• 2 years ago

yet some of these companies use your personal data to train ai, which you can't opt of.

jprete• 2 years ago

Yes, I agree and this annoys me. From a privacy perspective, it's still better to have fifty siloed data stores that aren't allowed to mix than for your data to be in a single large store that can do whatever it wants.

commandlinefan2• 2 years ago

And when you consider the comparison, it's even worse: the data they're refusing to allow Apple to train on is _public_ data. There were several court cases in the early 1900's where owners of big buildings tried to sue photographers for selling pictures of their buildings (or pictures that included their buildings) and it was finally agreed that since the building was in public, pictures of it were fair game. If you're putting an article on the internet for anybody to read, "anybody" seems like it would include an AI as well.

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

If you're putting an article on the internet for anybody to read, "anybody" seems like it would include an AI as well.

Do you think there's something wrong with having a ToS that specifically excludes AI?

BehindBlueEyes3• 2 years ago

Interesting! There's a difference though to me: if the building has a giant poster of a popular IP on it, afaik it doesn't give the photographer any rights to use that IP in their creations. I see enough series shot in Vancouver that avoid including things like that or keep it blurred out if it can't be out of frame...

Content on websites has copyright in some form, just because it isn't behind a paywall/accountwall doesn't make it public domain.

teqsun• 2 years ago

I've been wondering: the efforts to block AI scrapers many sites have implemented, are they because AI scrapers hit the sites too hard and cause hosting costs to increase, or because of a potential value in licensing of their data (i.e. "If you want this data you gotta pay me some big AI money for it").

brigadier132• 2 years ago

All of it. Site scraping for search used to actually be beneficial for content creators but now it’s detrimental to them

HenryBemis• 2 years ago

"This is why we can't have good things". Something that was created for the benefit, has been mis/ab-used and now is being removed.

I am also thinking (more and more lately) the movie The Congress (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/) and how easy it will be very soon to make a company without human actors. The mega-big studios can train AI by feeding it all their movies, then feed it with the scenario (this is where we - the humans come in - the famous "prompt engineers"), and a movie will be created.

Now, to the above scenario there will be a lot of corrections (can't walk in the air/water/nails)(can't open with killing a dog unless "John Wick" or "Sacred Games")(Sandra Bullock can levitate in "Gravity" but not on "Speed")(etc.)

Eventually if you hire 1000 people to watch 2 iterations of the new movie per day and make corrections to each (100025 = ), the AI will learn and improve on these unrealistic outputs and eventually you can produce movies weekly.

Yo Netflix people, if you haven't started doing this already, START! :) (oh and make a follow-up series on Sacred Games while at it)

EDIT: that's quite a tangent, but I can imagine the day where I will be asking my Paramount-AI "hey, make an original Star Trek series based on this-and-that, I want to binge it next weekend!" (or show me the one you created for someone else)

dageshi• 2 years ago

Yup.

Still wondering where AI is gonna get its raw information from in a few years when 90% of websites have given up updating.

tomjen32• 2 years ago

Only for a small group who makes money on ads. For any small business it is either a wash or a boon, since it makes people more likely to know about them. Your hotel does not care where you found them, and will be quite happy not to pay the experia fee. Same thing with the ethnical restaurant, the hardresser or the accountant.

For those who make money on subscriptions it is a no issue, since the robot can't index the content anyway.

But yeah, if you are an influencer, well the world is probably strictly better of without you.

simonw• 2 years ago

I don’t think it’s either of those. I think it’s because they don’t like the idea of their content being used to train a model that can compete with their content in the future.

At least search engine crawlers may drive traffic to them later. What’s in it for them to contribute to model training?

tojaprice• 2 years ago

I wonder if the next step for AI companies (those in control of search, at least) will be to start refusing to index content from companies that have opted out, in an effort to sway their decisions.

39896880• 2 years ago

It’s the latter. Why give away something that the most valuable public company in the world wants?

BehindBlueEyes3• 2 years ago

I wish users would think more like this and asked to be paid for data collection :)

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

Don't know about other sites, but on my own, the issue is neither of those things. It's that I simply don't want my data to contribute to the training of these models at all.

BehindBlueEyes3• 2 years ago

I wouldn't mind as much if I could then use the best/latest models that trained on my data for free. As it is, there is nothing in it for me.

If they just use my content to then tell users without needing to come to my site, and get ad revenue from that - no thank you. Not what AI is doing now, but looking at SEO I don't see where else this could be heading...

luma• 2 years ago

The same sites whose “journalism” mostly involves rephrasing reports they picked off of the news wire.

They just don’t want the competition.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Apple doesn't compete

spogbiper• 2 years ago

...yet

layer8• 2 years ago

Apple News exists [0]. While the content is externally sourced at present, it certainly competes in that space.

[0] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

seydor• 2 years ago

Why do they train their models on that data then?

digitalsushi• 2 years ago

hollywood makes a 100 million dollar movie.

a company sends a robot to watch it. 7 dollars for a single ticket.

the world spends their ticket money on hanging out with the robot to hear about the movie.

i can't make heads or tails of what's next. i am as fascinated as i am petrified.

sva_2• 2 years ago

It would be very speciest to say that a human is allowed to buy a ticket and watch a movie, but a robot is not.

raincole2• 2 years ago

Human is already the special case in every single aspect of legislation.

If the laws are written in code (pun intended), they would look like:

    if typeof(subject) == Human then
    ...

falcolas2• 2 years ago

A robot (nor the software that runs it) has no inherent rights, as it's a non-sentient creation. That's why they can't go into a movie theater without the theater's explicit permission. Plus, the whole "companies can chose who they associate with" thing means not all humans can even go into a movie theater.

And if we want to jog down this rabbit hole, I suggest starting with existing animals which we're realizing are sentient, but still prevent them from going into movie theaters. Once octopi can visit the movie theater, let's revisit the the robot argument.

rurp3• 2 years ago

What a weird take. Nobody cares about a robot watching a movie, it's the robot reselling that movie and keeping the profits that is objectionable. I don't understand the speciest angle at all. Humans both inside and outside of tech rate intelligent non-human biological life as much less important than human life. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's clearly true. Elevating non-biological life to parity with humans makes no sense.

ben_w10• 2 years ago

Eventually, sure.

But for the moment, and I say this as someone very impressed and somewhat scared with AI progress, they're probably sufficiently un-person-like today that it's not unreasonable to ban current models.

kalleboo• 2 years ago

It would be very speciest to say that a human is allowed to buy a ticket and watch a movie, but a video camera is not.

wwweston2• 2 years ago

Fortunately, since we already treat artificial entities like corporations and their interests as if they’re legally people even if it means that humans suffer, we should have no problems ushering in the cyberpocalypse in which we pretend that we’re being equitable to other things we pretend are life forms by sacrificing the interests of some human beings to those of others with the capital to own good stochastic parrots.

latexr• 2 years ago

Why would that be weird? In addition to robots, other entities which are not allowed to buy a ticket to watch a movie include tigers, elephants, tardigrades, tarantulas, seagulls, ants, pelicans, dolphins…

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

This is, in my opinion, a silly argument for a number of reasons. The main one being that a robot is not a "species", it is a machine.

maltyr• 2 years ago

I'm already getting personalized spam mail that's probably powered by AI ("use this API" type marketing in my work email.) I'm okay with this, even if I find it a little unsettling.

I think the dystopian future we're heading towards is personalized phishing and/or scams that sends to your hijacked accounts' contacts that you're going through a hard time and requesting donations, using training data from crowdfunding sites.

Or, one-level more dystopian, hijacking social media accounts and advertising AI-generated Patreon-style content using the actual account owner's likeness.

dialup_sounds• 2 years ago

Movie recap channels on YouTube are basically this already. They summarize a 90-180 minute movie into 15 minutes of silent clips and narration. Very popular, and plausibly done end-to-end by a bot within the next few years.

What's next is the bot writing the whole story and generating the visuals. For the cost of one actual movie, Slopflix could turn out thousands of recap style stories.

tomjen32• 2 years ago

In you case it is not obvious that it would be a bad deal for the movie makers - perhaps, on net, it would get more people wanting to see the movie?

ben_w10• 2 years ago

the world spends their ticket money on hanging out with the robot to hear about the movie.

Yes, but I can already do that by reading plot summaries on Wikipedia.

I've read precisely zero Harry Potter books, and of the films seen 1, 2 in the background muted, 3, and 4.

Despite this I know about Dolores Umbridge's personality (oh, and just recognised the reason for the name), that Snape Kills Dumbledore, and several other events and characters that were also not in any of those films.

fluidcruft• 2 years ago

But do you know Sirius's vault number at Gringots?

talldayo• 2 years ago

Imagine how dangerous this will be, once we have the technology to send a human with a built-in camera to that theater. Humanity and our poor 100 Million dollar films will be ruined!

dagmx2• 2 years ago

A big chunk of their list have signed agreements with OpenAI, or in Meta’s case, has a competitor.

I’d argue the way Wired is reporting this as a gotcha is also a conflict of interest because of their deal with an effective competitor.

https://www.wired.com/story/conde-nast-openai-deal/

“WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training”

Versus

“The media company joins The Atlantic, Axel Springer, Vox Media, and a host of other publishers who have partnered with OpenAI.”

nerdjon2• 2 years ago

I find it quite concerning that we are going into a situation where some things can crawl some sites but not others.

I have my own serious ethical concerns about AI, but from a pure searchability standpoint it is likely to cause more problems than solve.

Information is going to start being silo'd. It would be like if I had to go to Google for one thing and Bing for something else.

That being said, I am also quite concerned about what you mentioned. I was not happy when I found out that ArsTechnica signed a deal with OpenAI (or I assume their parent company did). Did that deal include any requirements of how they talk about OpenAI, AI in General, or their competitors?

The concerns over AI are real, but they are putting a short term gain over the long term damage by somehow thinking that licensing data is going to save them.

The tone of this is a bit weird, do we have similar "blocking google", "blocking anthropic", "blocking meta" articles? Instead of what is really happening is those partnerships were formed so everything not that partnership is being blocked.

pjc502• 2 years ago

The Internet has long existed in a state of tension over where value gets created, how it is consumed, and who pays for it. This had evolved into an uneasy truce of ad-supported big sites, making the web almost (but not quite) unusable for most people except a few adblocking freeloaders who get the good experience.

AI just blows all that up by providing a general-purpose plagiarism engine. It offers a substitute for any content, with a similar-looking but inauthentic version. People might accept not paywalling in order to reach human users, but nobody wants to be fodder for the plagiarism bot.

In some ways this is the "Can Googlebot scrape your content and display it on the home page but without generating any ad views for you?" debate we've seen with news publishers before.

dagmx2• 2 years ago

How this affects their journalistic integrity was oddly not covered in the articles from their various publications that I’ve seen.

Ars since you mentioned it https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/opena...

To your point about siloed information, we also see this with Reddit and Google, since they have an exclusivity agreement.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

Information is going to start being silo'd

There is an argument for banning (or limiting the term of) exclusive licensing arrangements for purposes of training an LLM. Nobody is forced to do business with anyone. But OpenAI or Facebook shouldn't be able to force a publisher to only do business with them, thereby closing the market to new entrants.

blibble• 2 years ago

Information is going to start being silo'd. It would be like if I had to go to Google for one thing and Bing for something else.

we're already there: a month ago reddit signed an agreement with Google to ingest their data, and then blocked everyone else (e.g. bing)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

AI killed the Internet

masto• 2 years ago

If e-mail were invented today, you wouldn't be able to communicate with people who weren't on the same service provider.

markx2• 2 years ago

Does wordpress.com count as a major site? They host a huge amount of sites.

They are saying Yes to everyone. There is no indication anywhere that they block AI scrapers.

In fact, they let a blogger 'profit'.

https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/07/30/perplexity-partnership...

goles• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/Zz5r1

aucisson_masque• 2 years ago

Robots.txt allows website owners to block or permit bots on a case-by-case basis. While there’s no legal obligation for bots to adhere.

I don't know how long it's going to work like that, internet is basically the farewest. If you can't paywall your data, someone is free to take it.

Beside I bet most article written on these website used artificial intelligence to do so.

spacebanana7• 2 years ago

News and media sites are not very high value data sources for AI models. There's not that much additional value from having 100 news sites in your data or 100k because so much content is generic with a high degree of overlap.

It'd be much more concerning if academic publishers, code repositories and wikipedia refused scraping.

overstay8930• 2 years ago

This has gotta be the dumbest “debate” (at least in the USA). If you put something on the internet without protection (i.e. DRM), it is public. Enforcing a data cartel like apple is doing has gotta be the absolute worse outcome, only the ultra rich can afford to get the good and correct information while the poor get whatever scraps they can get.

Apple drank the kool-aid and now has to deal with the fact that those bad faith arguments make no sense in reality.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

If you put something on the internet without protection (i.e. DRM), it is public

This is a meaningless semantic punt to the word public. At the end of the day, there is a real debate around how ownership works in relation to AI.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

Data being viewable but being subject to some restrictions isn't some new thing, it's how it has always worked. E.g. if I can view a website it's public but copying/pasting it somewhere else is a violation of copyright. We've never lived in a world where you can just do whatever you want with someone else's content and there's on fact a whole huge portion of the law around intellectual property for this exact sort of thing.

MetaverseClub• 2 years ago

I now need to deliberately choose the sites I browse to avoid those that work with the stupid closeAI?

Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple's AI Scraping

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