Chapter 1
The giant digital vacuum cleaner
Chapter 2
The mysterious black box
Chapter 3
When robots make things up
Chapter 4
The battle for the internet's words
Ch 4 · The battle for the internet's words
007skaty AI Licensing Deals
OpenAI buys the papers just to train (yeah, to train!) / Paying millions for the Reddit stream (oh-oh, the stream!)
BETA
007skaty Trace the AI's thoughts to their sources to learn how algorithms pull information from nowhere.
007skaty Originally designed to guide search engine crawlers, the robots.txt file now stops AI companies from downloading publisher content
Quiz
Which major news organization was among the first to block AI web crawlers using their robots.txt file in 2023?
007skaty AI systems scrape massive online databases to learn and replicate human artistic styles
Quiz
What legal doctrine do AI companies rely on to argue they can train on copyrighted books and art?
Fun Fact
Reddit data gold: In 2024, Google signed a deal worth roughly sixty million dollars per year just to access Reddit posts for AI training!
Quiz
Why are popular forums like Reddit starting to charge AI companies massive fees for data access?
Quiz
What is a potential negative side effect of websites locking their data behind paywalls to block AI?
Quiz
Which major news publisher signed a landmark multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI in late 2023?