The “scraping” part becomes unethical when the scraping is so aggressive that it takes down the website (or severely impacts its ability to serve actual clients).
Archive.org scrapes the web all the time, but it doesn’t do it so aggressively that it becomes an issue for the websites they’re scraping. The same cannot be said for AI scrapers.
Scraping more than necessary is so stupid that I just sort of dismissed it as a straight-up mistake that will eventually be corrected. I was arguing based on general principle, not specific current practice.
Obviously, yes, the AI companies should fix their (probably vibe-coded) scrapers so they stop misbehaving; that should’ve gone without saying.
The “scraping” part becomes unethical when the scraping is so aggressive that it takes down the website (or severely impacts its ability to serve actual clients).
Archive.org scrapes the web all the time, but it doesn’t do it so aggressively that it becomes an issue for the websites they’re scraping. The same cannot be said for AI scrapers.
Scraping more than necessary is so stupid that I just sort of dismissed it as a straight-up mistake that will eventually be corrected. I was arguing based on general principle, not specific current practice.
Obviously, yes, the AI companies should fix their (probably vibe-coded) scrapers so they stop misbehaving; that should’ve gone without saying.