Cloudflare to prevent companies from raking the content without consent

Internet signature Cloud frame It will begin to block artificial intelligence trackers to access the content without the permission or compensation of the owners of the website by default, in a movement that could significantly affect the capacity of IA developers to train their models.

As of Tuesday, each new web domain will be asked that is registered in Cloudflare if they want to allow Hastraweers, effectively giving them the ability to prevent the bots from scraping the data of their websites.

Cloudflare is what is called a content delivery network, or CDN. Help companies deliver content and faster online applications when storing data closer to end users. They play a important role By ensuring that people can access the web content without problems every day.

Approximately 16% of the global Internet traffic passes directly through the Cloudflare CDN, the estimated company in 2023 report.

“IA trackers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put power in the hands of the creators, while helping the companies of Innovating,” said Matthew Prince, co -founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement on Tuesday.

“It’s about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” he added.

The AI ​​trackers are automated bots designed to extract large amounts of website data, databases and other sources of information to train large language models of OpenAI’s tastes and Google.

While the Internet previously rewarded creators by directing users to original websites, according to Cloudflare, today IA trackers are breaking that model collecting text, articles and images to generate answers to consultations in a way that users do not need to visit the original source.

This, the company adds, is depriving vital traffic editors and, in turn, the income of online advertising.

Tuesday’s movement is based on a tool that Cloudflare was launched in September last year that gave editors the ability to block the IA trackers with a single click. Now, the company goes one more step when this is the default value for all websites for which it provides services.

Operai says he declined to participate when Cloudflare observed his plan to block the IA trackers by default because the content delivery network is adding an intermediary to the system.

The Laboratory of the IA backed by Microsoft emphasized its role as a pioneer of the use of robots.txt, a set of code that avoids the automatic scraping of the web data, and said that its trackers respect the preferences of the editor.

“IA trackers are usually seen as more invasive and selective when it comes to the data they consume. They have been accused of overwhelming websites and significantly impacting the user’s experience,” Matthew Holman, a partner of the United Kingdom’s law firm Cripps, told CNBC.

“If it is effective, development would make the ability of AI Chatbots difficult to reap data for training and search purposes,” he added. “This is likely to lead to a short -term impact on the training of the AI ​​model and, in the long term, it could affect the viability of the models.”

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