Source URL: https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-bots-are-destroying-open-access.html
Source: Hacker News
Title: AI bots are destroying Open Access
Feedly Summary: Comments
AI Summary and Description: Yes
**Summary:** The text discusses the ongoing battle between AI companies and institutions like libraries and open-access publishers, highlighting the aggressive tactics employed by AI bots that threaten the availability of quality information. It points out the challenges faced by these institutions in protecting their resources, the emergence of advanced scrapers, and how these dynamics endanger public access to scholarly content.
**Detailed Description:**
The narrative describes a significant conflict in the digital landscape where AI companies, driven by their hunger for high-quality data to train Large Language Models (LLMs), are negatively impacting libraries, archives, non-profits, and scholarly publishers. This situation raises various implications for information security in the context of access to academic resources.
– **The Rise of AI Bots:**
– AI bots are characterized as aggressive and indiscriminate, causing undue strain on servers.
– Traditional bots had defined behaviors, while today’s bots overwhelm resources through random user-agent strings and high request rates.
– **Impact on Libraries and Resources:**
– Libraries and open-access resources are facing disruptions due to these bots, with examples including:
– The inability of the Internet Archive to preserve content from MIT Press.
– Outages at OAPEN, impacting thousands of books.
– Severe traffic spikes leading to widespread inaccessibility of resources.
– **Response Strategies:**
– Libraries are resorting to blocking entire regions (e.g., IP addresses from China) and using third-party services like Cloudflare for bot management.
– Discussion around temporary solutions versus permanent fixes, with an understanding that this conflict is ongoing.
– **Long-term Consequences:**
– The text warns of a future where access to quality information may be restricted behind paywalls and registration barriers, threatening open access and democratic access to knowledge.
– **Innovative Defense Mechanisms:**
– Projects like iocaine and nepenthes are mentioned, which propose creating automated systems to keep bots occupied, showcasing a potential approach to mitigate the impact of scraping bots.
The overall tone reflects a concern not only for the operational challenges faced by these institutions but also for the overarching implications for knowledge dissemination and information accessibility in an era increasingly dominated by AI-driven entities.