LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.
This is like arguing that services can't provide access to libraries that provide public WiFi because it would give the public legal permission to pirate TV shows. They're two unrelated things. And then some members of the public argue that they're making fair use rather than pirating anything, but that still has nothing to do with the library.
But as I understand it, the Web Archive does respect robots.txt, while LLM scrapers absolutely do not and use all sorts of dodgy methods to get around it already...
The actual root cause is that we're allowing LLM companies to completely disregard copyright laws for their profit. Whether the LLM companies scrape the Web Archive or the original source doesn't change the copyright infringement implications in any way, and cutting off the web archive doesn't practically change anything (because as I understand, LLM scraping is already prolific all over the web).
Is there a case that actually says this? Why would whether something is fair use depend on that? For that matter, how would they even show that a given AI model was trained on something from a recursive crawler rather than the same articles added to the training data after being downloaded by hand?
Twitter griefs everyone with a login wall because they want bulk downloaders to pay for API access instead and the login wall is an attempt to rate limit non-API bulk requests.
That isn't relevant to ordinary media outlets because a) they don't have enough content volume for rate limiting to be effective since it's possible to get everything they publish even at a slow rate limit, and b) getting AI scrapers to subscribe to their bulk download API instead is not the objective in their case.
You can call it whatever you want but it’s killing journalism when LLMs can automatically scrape and reword all the news. Sucking up the profits without contributing anything back to the people who created the work.
I don’t think many people are getting daily news from LLMs. Journalism has been dying since long before LLMs burst onto the scene as well.
There really isn’t even a defensible argument as to how this even should be illegal. The idea that someone can read words about a concept, and then rewording an explanation of that concept somehow violating the rights of the original author, is absurd.
The issue here and elsewhere isn’t LLMs. It’s that IP as a concept has always been a dystopic farce. Despite this we have not only kicked the can down the road on addressing this, we’ve doubled and tripled down and built our society around the concept. The advent of AI has simply blown the scale of the problem up to the point where it cannot be ignored any longer.
> I don’t think many people are getting daily news from LLMs.
How many people do you think use LLMs in some fashion at all in their daily lives? Genuine question, I'm sure my personal experience is a biased sample, but so is everyone else's. Stats from AI companies isn't going to be (seen as) objective either. OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing a feature where I get a situation report at 9am like I'm an important official. With both labs pushing that, I think some people are getting their daily news from LLMs, the question is how many would it take for it to be meaningful, and how would we know if/when that bar gets crossed? What are the implications of that?
The general problem here is that as soon as something is news, there will be not only numerous articles about it from multiple publications but also discussion of it on social media.
Which means LLMs have a zillion sources to get the story. Removing any given subset isn't going to prevent it from having the information in the training data, all it does is prevent that subset from being archived for future humans.
Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.