Tech

Cloudflare launches war on Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI bots with comprehensive free tool to block all crawlers

What you need to knowCloudflare is a global cloud provider that provides security and DDoS protection for millions of websites, securing roughly 20% of the world's internet traffic. Yesterday, Cloudflare announced that it would be making a new free tool available to all customers specifically designed to block AI crawlers. AI bots used by many companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, steal copyrighted information from websites like ours to train their premium AI services. Last week, Microsoft's head of AI said that all publicly available internet content is “freeware” that is stolen for the company's AI ambitions.

Last week, Microsoft's AI chief said that public content on the open web is “freeware,” meaning trillion-dollar companies have free reign to steal any content users publish to the web and leverage it for premium products. The backlash from this gaffe was huge, and it served as a wake-up call for web content providers to reconsider their relationships with companies like Microsoft that seek to profit from the efforts of content creators while giving literally nothing in return. Cloudflare may have handed those same creators a crucial defensive weapon with which to fight back.

Cloudflare is a global internet services and hosting company that serves approximately 20% of all web traffic. Offering services such as DDoS protection and bot validation checks for websites, Cloudflare uses its massive server infrastructure as a vast security layer for businesses of all shapes and sizes, helping to improve the overall quality of the World Wide Web.

The company announced yesterday that it will begin rolling out new features designed to combat generative AI to all users, including free ones.

To help keep the Internet safe for content creators, we launched a new “easy button” to block all AI bots. Available to all customers, including those on our free plan. For more information, see our blog post: https://t.co/csWFFgqbKMJuly 3, 2024

Cloudflare said in a blog post that it was declaring “AIndependence”: its new system will allow users to opt-in to block AI bots and crawlers from accessing their websites, effectively preventing the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI from stealing web content for free.

Cloudflare released data showing that after surveying its users, over 80% of customers want the ability to block content theft by Microsoft. “We heard loud and clear from our customers — they don't want AI bots accessing their websites, especially illicit ones,” Cloudflare said. “To help, we've added a brand new feature to block all AI bots with one click, available to all customers, including those on our free plan.”

Generative AI training content is becoming profitable and valuable to companies like Google and Microsoft. Google reportedly paid over $60 million for access to all of Reddit’s content to train its models, with the amusing result that sarcasm and trolls are now appearing in Google search results.

Can Microsoft find a healthy balance?

Microsoft Copilot is the company's best AI effort to date, and it's essentially Bing with an extra layer of functionality. (Image credit: Windows Central)

Previously, I wrote that it would be in Google and Microsoft’s interest to have a healthy, symbiotic relationship between human creators and generative AI efforts. While generative AI undoubtedly has a role to play in the future of technology, it feels like companies are still struggling with what that specifically means for their customers. Currently, generative AI seems to be most often used for the most basic writing tasks, such as composing formal emails or summarizing long pieces of text. Yet, upon closer inspection, even the basics are problematic. Given that we need to double-check everything the AI does to avoid AI “hallucinations,” we found that it often only hurts productivity rather than improves it.

AI is also very expensive to operate. AI queries hurt Google's efforts to reduce emissions, and I don't think Microsoft is doing a very good job here either. Even ignoring the climate impact, this business model doesn't seem to work well today. Microsoft offers Copilot for free, but I don't see why you should pay for it.

Related article: Why Microsoft won't be the company that brings AI to consumers

A low-hanging fruit feature that Google and Microsoft quickly picked up on is search summaries. At Windows Central, we create thousands of guides, and Microsoft Copilot just takes our article content and replicates it, taking away our traffic and revenue. This is bad for us, but it's also bad for Microsoft and Google. When human content creators can no longer effectively monetize and make a living, more and more parts of the internet will be generated by AI. As with JPEG compression, content quality will suffer when AI starts to learn from other AIs instead of human creators. After all, AIs don't “understand” the content they replicate, they can only infer context by comparing it to human content. This phenomenon is called model collapse, and it's a real concern among serious AI scientists. But for now, all Google, Microsoft, and other companies are thinking about is moving forward.

For this kind of technology to really take off, human intervention is still needed. The alarm stoked by Microsoft's AI chief's irresponsible “freeware” comments has only fueled an ongoing backlash. Now, with companies like Cloudflare joining the fight back, it won't be long before others follow suit, and Microsoft may have to seriously rethink its complacency towards industrial-scale content theft.

Sources

1/ https://Google.com/

2/ https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/cloudflare-goes-to-war-with-microsoft-google-and-openais-bots-with-blanket-free-tools-to-block-all-crawlers

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