What you need to know
- Cloudflare is a global cloud provider that provides security and DDoS protection to millions of websites, protecting approximately 20% of all global internet traffic.
- Yesterday, Cloudflare announced a new free tool that it will offer to all customers, specifically designed to block AI crawlers.
- AI bots used by companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and many others steal copyrighted information from websites like ours to train their premium AI services.
- Last week, Microsoft’s AI director said that all public internet content was “freeware” that could be stolen to further the company’s AI ambitions.
Last week, Microsoft’s AI chief said that public content on the open web was “freeware,” giving the trillion-dollar company a free license to steal any content you published on the web to power its premium products. The backlash for the gaffe was significant, and served as a klaxon of sorts for web content providers to rethink their relationships with companies like Microsoft, which want to profit from the hard work of content creators without literally giving anything in return. Cloudflare may have also given those same creators a much more important defensive weapon in the fight back.
Cloudflare is a global internet service and hosting company, driving approximately 20% of all web traffic. Cloudflare offers features such as DDoS protection against attacks and bot verification checks on websites, and has been instrumental in improving the overall quality of the world wide web, using its massive server infrastructure as a massive layer of security for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Yesterday, the company announced a new feature that it will be rolling out to all users, even those on the free version, that is intended to combat generative AI.
To maintain a safe internet for content creators, we just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available to all customers, including those on our free tier. Read our blog post for more details: https://t.co/csWFFgqbKMJuly 3, 2024
Declare “AIndependence,” Cloudflare says on its blog. The new system will give users the ability to block AI bots and crawlers from accessing websites, effectively preventing Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and others from stealing free web content.
After surveying its users, Cloudflare shared data showing that over 80% of its customers wanted the ability to block Microsoft from stealing their content. “We’re hearing clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their sites, especially ones that are dishonest.” Cloudflare continued, “To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click feature to block all AI bots, available to all customers, including those on the free plan.”
Generative AI training content is becoming lucrative and valuable for companies like Google and Microsoft. Google reportedly paid over $60 million for access to all of Reddit’s content to train its models, which also included hilarious content and sarcasm and trolling in Google search results.
Can Microsoft find a healthy balance?
I’ve written before that it should be in Google and Microsoft’s best interest to create a healthy, symbiotic relationship between their human creators and their generative AI efforts. Generative AI undoubtedly has a role to play in the future of technology, but I feel like businesses are still struggling with what exactly that looks like for customers. Right now, generative AI seems best used for the most basic writing tasks, like producing formal emails or summarizing long texts. Even then, it struggles with even basic things when you dig into it. I’ve found that it often just undermines productivity rather than improves it, since you have to double-check everything the AI does to avoid its “hallucinations.”
AI is also incredibly expensive to run. AI queries are a drain on Google’s efforts to reduce emissions, and I doubt Microsoft is doing much better. Even if you ignore the climate impact, the business model doesn’t seem to work these days. Microsoft gives Copilot away for free, and I don’t know why I would ever pay for it.
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The low hanging fruit feature that Google and Microsoft have been very quick to adopt is search summaries. We produce thousands of guides here at Windows Central and Microsoft Copilot will now simply take the content of the article and reproduce it, losing us traffic and therefore revenue. That’s bad for us, but it’s also bad for Microsoft and Google. If human content creators can no longer effectively monetize and make a living from it, more and more of the web will be generated by AI. Much like JPEG compression, the quality of content will deteriorate as AI learns from other AIs, rather than from human creators. Because ultimately, AI will not “understand” the content it reproduces and can only infer context by making comparisons to human content. This phenomenon is called model collapse and is a real concern among serious AI scientists. But for now, Google, Microsoft, and others are only thinking about progress.
For this kind of technology to actually spread, human intervention is still needed. The alarm bells raised by Microsoft’s AI chief with his irresponsible comments about “freeware” have contributed to the ongoing backlash. And now companies like Cloudflare are stepping up to help fight back. It won’t be long before others follow suit, and Microsoft may finally have to reckon with its cavalier attitude toward its industrial-scale content theft.