AI's Indirect Threat to the Wayback Machine

Users of the Wayback Machine, a service of the Internet Archive, will find the item below of interest. The Wayback Machine enables a look at websites in the past. Thus, changes in information or deletions of information can be tracked.

From the San Francisco Examiner:

If you use the Internet Archive to look up recent news stories from some of the biggest media companies, you might have trouble finding them.

In recent months, a growing number of news publications have sought to block the nonprofit online library from crawling their sites and making copies of their stories or other content, or restricted its ability to share their content.

Although the San Francisco-based organization has frequently had a contentious relationship with a variety of copyright holders, the publications’ moves come not so much out of concern about the archive itself, but with artificial-intelligence developers.

To prevent what many publishers see as theft of their copyrighted material by potential competitors, some of them have blocked AI developers from crawling their websites and copying stories from them. But many such publishers have grown concerned in recent months that AI developers are using the archive as a kind of back door to the publishers’ content, and so they’ve also started to block its access to their material or curtailed its ability to distribute that material.

“We are collateral damage,” said Mark Graham, director of the archive’s Wayback Machine, its web-page repository.

For their part, certain publishers see blocking the archive’s access to their material or its ability to share that material as crucial to protecting their businesses at a time when search engines and AI chatbots are increasingly answering users’ news queries directly rather than directing them to news sites...

Full story at https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/internet-archive-collateral-damage-in-ai-news-battle/article_d3a37294-dc35-4861-8f7a-0a8cbfb12a58.html.