Quote · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1091: But You Didn't Move the Bodies - Surprising Supreme Court Move on Geofence Warrants
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Cloudflare vs. AI Bots, AI Scraping, and the Death of Open Web Publishing
At 1:02:54 · chapter starts 56:30
Leo introduces Cloudflare's move to block AI bots from ad-supported websites, drawing a comparison to when Spanish news outlets blocked Google snippets — and then begged Google to come back. Jason Hiner delivers his sharpest indictment of the AI industry [1] — Jason Hiner "AI companies scraped the entire internet — copyright content and all — to train their models. Now Cloudflare is blocking those bots, but th…" 2:11:50 : the models were trained by scraping the entire open web, copyright and all. GPT-3 may have been 30–40% Reddit. The owners of that content never consented and never got paid. Now Cloudflare is locking the remaining 20%, but the theft has already happened. The AI companies' strategy, Jason says, is to grow large enough to go public, then settle the copyright lawsuits as a class action for pennies on the dollar. Lisa notes that AI overviews have already gutted affiliate revenue for consumer technology sites, and Owen describes watching Google's ad value collapse for a friend's business after the AI summary changes.
Cloudflare announced it will block AI training crawlers from accessing ad-supported websites by default starting September 15th, defaulting to allowing search crawling but blocking AI agents.
Google is scared for the first time in two decades. Its response — shoving more AI overviews at the users who haven't left yet — is backfiring. When Google I/O dropped and the new AI-heavy search launched, DuckDuckGo usage spiked. Google is hastening the very disruption it's trying to avoid.
