So sad for them. Try not living in a war zone?

Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.

But a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.

Oh fuck off with that AI company propaganda.

The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It's the same fucking thing.

Web crawlers for search engines don't scrape pages every time a user searches like AI does. Both web crawlers and scrapers are bots, and how a human initiates their operation, scheduled or not, doesn't matter as much as the fact that they do things very differently and only one of the two respects robots.txt.

On the flip side, most websites are so ad-ridden these days a reader mode or other summary tool is almost required for normal browsing.

Firefox with uBlock Origin works perfectly fine and pages load faster without the ads!

It's more than simply astonishing, it's mind-blowingly bonkers how much money they have to burn to see ANY amount of return. You think a normal company is bad, blowing a few thousand bucks on materials, equipment, and labor per day in order to make a few bucks revenue (not profit)? AI companies have to blow HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on massive data center complexes in order to train their bots, and then the energy cost and water cost of running them adds a couple more million a day. ALL so they can make negative hundreds of dollars on every prompt you can dream of.

The ONLY reason AI firms are still a thing in the current tech tree is because Techbros everywhere have convinced the uberwealthy VC firms that AGI is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, and will save them SO much money on labor and efficiency that it'll all be worth it in permanent, pure, infinite profit. If that sounds like too much of a pipe dream to be realistic, congratulations, you're a sane and rational human being.

It isn’t a war zone, it’s a gated community where the guards have suddenly decided that any vehicle made after 2020 is full of thieves.

They didn’t bother to consult the residents or give them the ability to opt out of having their dinner guests murdered for driving a vehicle the security guards don’t like.

So you're a cloudflare customer and you wish they would let the perplexity traffic multiplier through to your website? You can leave cloudflare any time you want.

In a better timeline, we wouldn't need to cheer the victory of one megacorporation over another, they would both be the losers. But also people are still capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously.

For instance, we'd all be happy to see Apple lose the Epic Games lawsuit and be forced out of their monopoly on app stores on iOS. But those same people are aware it would allow Epic to continue being a disgusting company.

bait the anti-ai crowd

Oh I see lol

they don't outright block ai crawlers. they added some new tools and options for managing or blocking ai bot traffic which the cloudflare customer can choose to use or to not use.

im running a free educational resource and i let the crawlers hit my site all they want because its useful knowledge unavailable anywhere else and it's served to them from cloudflare's free tier cache. i just don't know why they have to read it ten thousand times a day.

I can’t get over their CEO that looks like a nine year old. Not sure what it is about him

The anti-AI shield and bot-fight mode are free, you don't need to pay anything to use them.

That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.

It should be pointed out that Cloudflare didn't say they were going to block AI traffic, they give you the option to. The service is a free opt-in for people who want it.

rare cloudflare w

Maybe I missed something, but ublock still works very fine for me, even on mobile. And running a pihole, while not trivial, also takes care of some ad traffic. Firefox coems with a reader mode (a feature I really like even with the adblockers!).

So why do people not want to visit pages anymore, if all these tools already existed?

Cheering for Cloudflare to be the arbiter of what technologies are allowed is incredibly short sighted. They exist to provide their clients with services, including bot mitigation.

Well I suppose it's a good thing then that the anti-AI shield is opt-in, and Cloudflare isn't making any decisions for anyone on whether or not AI scrapers get to visit their pages. That little bit of context makes your entire argument fall apart.

There’s no difference in server load between a user looking at a page and a user using an AI tool to summarize the page.

The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It’s the same fucking thing.

You either didn’t read the article or are deliberately making bad faith arguments. The entire point of the article is that the traffic that they’re referring to is initiated by a user, just like when you type an address into your browser’s address bar.

This traffic, initiated by a user, creates the same server load as that same user loading the page in a browser.

Yes, mass scraping of web pages creates a bunch of server load. This was the case before AI was even a thing.

This situation is like Cloudflare presenting was a captcha in order to load each individual image, css or JavaScript asset into a web browser because bot traffic pretends to be a browser.

I don’t think it’s too hard to understand that a bot pretending to be a browser and a human operated browser are two completely different things and classifying them as the same (and captchaing them) would be a classification error.

This is exactly the same kind of error. Even if you personally believe that users using AI tools should be blocked, not everyone has the same opinion. If Cloudflare can’t distinguish between bot requests and human requests then their customers can’t opt out and allow their users to use AI tools even if they want to.

It isn’t opt in.

You can block all bot page scraping, and also block user initiated AI tools or you can block no traffic.

There isn’t an option to block bot page scraping but allow user initiated AI tools.

Because, as the article points out, Cloudflare is not able to distinguish between the two

Step 1, SOMEHOW find a more punchable face than Altman

You’re an Internet user and you don’t like AI so you can leave the Internet anytime you want.

That’s not a good argument, what about the users who want to block mass scraping but want to make their content available to users who are using these tools? Cloudflare exists because it allows legitimate traffic, that websites want, and blocks mass scraping which the sites don’t want.

If they’re not able to distinguish mass scraping traffic from user created traffic then they’re blocking legitimate users that some website owners want.