Microchip with AI letters on it.

Worth Reading – Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default

This is the logical next step in the escalating conflict between website publishers and AI scrapers.

Cloudflare wants AI companies to get permission to crawl websites.

https://www.theverge.com/news/695501/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-default

They are giving websites the option to block all known AI crawlers, let only a few in, and in select cases, allow large media sites to charge a fee for scraping.

No more scraping the entire content of every site they can find for free.

On the other hand, if giant AI companies that currently don’t make a profit have to start paying out for training data, especially current content, how many will no longer exist? Yes, this is an escalation, but is it also another step toward the AI bubble burst that many have predicted? If so, what does the job market look like after that happens?

Updated to add that this could get complicated and may not be everyone’s cup of tea – Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t.

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