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.
Sometimes I wonder what the prevalent response to AI would be if we lived in a better world? There are environmental and resource concerns, but I think if they weren’t desperately trying to shove it everywhere to make a profit I’m not sure those would be unmanageable.
Information still wants to be free, but the way corporations are actually using AI right now in our economic hellscape punches people much lower in the (Maslow’s) hierarchy of needs.