The rise of the robot gangsters

Content harvesting robo-bandits are demolishing long held standards on the open internet.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 13:35, 27 June 2024

During the westward expansion of the United States, the various governmental authorities in charge were at times simply reactive in their decision making. Settlers often made the facts on the ground before anyone in authority even knew of it, and land ended up being recategorised retrospectively. If there was a gold rush, then all bets were off.

Something similar seems to be occurring with greater frequency as data hungry Gen-AI businesses are now violating a basic protocol, the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which has helped keep the internet reasonably honest for years.

After writing previously about the suspect crawling activities of "AI answers" company Perplexity as revealed by Wired, it was soon reported by Reuters that according to research from a business aiming to insert itself between publishers and AI companies, plenty of others are ignoring specific crawling exclusions in the robots.txt file in order to harvest data for LLM training purposes.

A caveat here, as the company who say they have proof of this, TollBit, is "positioning itself as a matchmaker between content-hungry AI companies and publishers open to striking licensing deals with them". So it has a dog in the fight, as it were, but I'm willing to entertain that it might be a dog publishers can harness. 

So, like the Wild West, we're seeing a land grab. Except the land is occupied by original content producers such as publishers. Are we to expect some retrospective legal rulings about content theft that change nothing after the fact?

Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas has given an interview with Fast Company in which he attempted to explain away the concerns about content harvesting, telling the publication that the "mysterious web crawler that Wired identified was not owned by Perplexity, but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services".

So that's ok then? It's not our burglar giving us the stuff. "It's complicated," said Srinivas. You bet it is. Perplexity have this week announced investment from SoftBank that values them at $3 billion.

Srinivas then took the position of a Formula One race team boss who has been discovered using a triple-baffle unobtainium centrifugal redistributor not specifically banned by the rulebook, telling Fast Company that that the Robot Exclusion Protocol is "not a legal framework" and suggesting that the emergence of AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators, or publishers, and sites like his. 

Reddit have moved in the past few days to update their own robots.txt file. A spokesman told TechCrunch that "bots and crawlers will be rate-limited or blocked if they don’t abide by Reddit’s Public Content Policy and don’t have an agreement with the platform".

As a reminder, Reddit has cut a $60 million deal with Google to allow to train its AI models on Reddit's user generated content. So it's holding a big legal hand if anyone violates the terms of its Public Content Policy and has no usage agreement with the platform.

Again, most publishers don't have such a legal resort so maybe there is a slot for specialist outfits along the lines of TollBit to cut through the crap and get us all a better deal?