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ELI5: Why do AI web scrapers take down sites? (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 hours ago by to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world
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I'd link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they're from went down a while ago.

At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host's resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?

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[–] 1 point 8 hours ago (1 child)

Same difference as being hit by a golf cart rolling down a sleight slope and 100 Semi's going 100mph

The problem isn't what they're doing, it's the speed and depth. There's no concern for efficiency because they're not paying for hardware and utilities.

Everything AI is focused on doing asuch as possible as fast as possible, with the hope optimization will happen organically to the point it becomes profitable.

But it won't.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 hours ago

    Correct. Google indexing your web page is rate limited for this reason, and you can even include a directive in your robots.txt to specify your own rate limit if you'd like the intervals to be longer (or shorter). The AI scrapers completely ignore your robots.txt. Except, I am certain, for abusing it as if it were a site map. Anything you list there is simply a target you've revealed to them. ("Hey, robots.txt says we shouldn't crawl /foo/bar.html. That means there's a page there! Let's hammer it with 900 page load requests per second!")

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