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AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
Photo by Emil Widlund / Unsplash

AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according to a new survey published today. While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported anecdotally, the survey is the first attempt at measuring the problem, which in the worst cases can make valuable, public resources unavailable to humans because the servers they’re hosted on are being swamped by bots scraping the internet for AI training data. 

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