Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.
These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.
Well, if we continue my analogy, government-run oil processing plants and gasoline subsidies have not historically worked well.
It’s a device of investing hard power into computing.
That cropland will repurpose itself by market laws if the change is so dramatic, I think it is. I don’t like the AI hype, but the major change of converting hard power into data and data into answers to questions is potent enough. It’s not just the difference in energy volumes between ethanol and solar power, it’s also that liquid fuel is easier to store. It’s not an equal comparison you’re making. But if the energy demand is skewed enough on the side of grid-connected datacenters, then economically solar power might become more attractive.
I think oligopoly on data is the main threat to this. Datacenters and hosters providing power to run whatever you want with whatever data you want are not the bottleneck for competition and good evolution.
Various data harvesting farms in which users roam are.
It’s funny, I’m optimistic lately and feel like this family of technologies is slowly killing the oligopolies of previous generation. Well, not themselves, but the mechanisms that brought them into existence. Of course they too have moved on past those, but it’s sort of an improvement.