I think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.

I for one am rooting for perplexity to go out of business forever.

Yeah, I know.

You’re engaging in motivated reasoning. That’s why you’re saying irrational things, because you’re working backwards from a conclusion (AI bad).

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.

The AI doesn't just do a web search and display a page, in grabs the search results and scrapes multiple pages far faster than a person could.

It doesn't matter whether a human initiated it when the load on the website is far, far higher and more intrusive in a shorter period of time with AI compared to a human doing a web search and reading the cobtent themselves.

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

The amount of people just reacting to the headline in the comments on these kinds of articles is always surprising.

Your browser acts as an agent too, you don’t manually visit every script link, image source and CSS file. Everyone has experienced how annoying it is to have your browser be targeted by Cloudflare.

There’s a pretty major difference between a human user loading a page and having it summarized and a bot that is scraping 1500 pages/second.

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

Which is the point of the article and the article’s title.

It isn’t clear why OP had to alter the headline to bait the anti-ai crowd.

When sites put challenges like Anubis or other measures to authenticate that the viewer isn't a robot, and scrapers then employ measures to thwart that authentication (via spoofing or other means) I think that's a reasonable violation of the CFAA in spirit — especially since these mass scraping activities are getting attention for the damage they are causing to site operators (another factor in the CFAA, and one that would promote this to felony activity.)

The fact is these laws are already on the books, we may as well utilize them to shut down this objectively harmful activity AI scrapers are doing.

…and Perplexity's scraping is unnecessarily traffic intensive since they don't cache the scraped data.

That seems almost maliciously stupid. We need to train a new model. Hey, where’d the data go? Oh well, let’s just go scrape it all again. Wait, did we already scrape this site? No idea, let’s scrape it again just to be sure.

I think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.

I don't see how categorically blocking non-human traffic is irrational given the current environment of AI scanning. And what's rational about demanding cloudflare distinguish between the 'good guy' AI and 'bad guy' AI without proposing any methodology for doing so.

Thank you for trying to fight the irrational anti-AI brainrot on lemmy! It’s probably a lost cause, but your efforts are appreciated

Thats not true, I just viewed my panel in CF, and Perplexity is an optional block, which by default is off.

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.

You say, just as news breaks that the top German court has over turned a decision that declared "AD blocking isn't piracy"

Unauthorized access into a computer system and “Piracy” are two very different things.

It is blocking human traffic, that’s the entire premise of the article.

Attempting to say that this is non-human traffic makes no sense if you understand how a browser works. When you load a website your browser, acting as an agent, does a lot of tasks for you and generates a bunch of web requests across multiple hosts.

Your browser downloads the HTML from the website, it parses the contents of that file for image, script and CSS links, it retrieves them from the various websites which host them, it interprets the JavaScript and makes any web requests based on that. Often the scripting has a user constantly sending requests to a website in order to update the content (like using web based email).

All of this is automated and done on your behalf. But you wouldn’t classify this traffic as non-human because a person told the browser to do that task and the task resulted in a flurry of web requests and processing on behalf of the user.

Summarization is just another task, which is requested by a human.

The primary difference, and why it is incorrectly classified, is because the summarization tools use a stripped down browser. It doesn’t need JavaScript to be rendered or CSS to change the background color so it doesn’t waste resources on rendering that stuff.

Cloudflare detects this kind of environment, one that doesn’t fully render a page, and assumes that it is a web scraper. This used to be a good way to detect scraping because the average user didn’t use web automation tools and scrapers did.

Regular users do use automation tools now, so detecting automation doesn’t guarantee that the agent is a scraper bot.

The point of the article is that their heuristics doesn’t work anymore because users use automation tools in a manner that doesn’t generate tens of millions of requests per second and overwhelm servers and so it shouldn’t classify them the same way.

The point of Cloudflare’s bot blocking is to prevent a single user from overwhelming a site’s resources. These tools don’t do that. Go use any search summarization tool and see for yourself, it usually grabs one page from each source. That kind of traffic uses less resources than a human user (because it only grabs static content).

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