You’re right. AI didn’t just triple the traffic to my tiny archive’s site. It way more than tripled it. After implementing Anubis, we went from 3000 ‘unique’ visitors down to 20 in a half-day. Twenty is a much more expected number for a small college archive in the summer. That’s before I did any fine-tuning to Anubis, just the default settings.
I was getting constant outage reports. Now I’m not.
For us, it’s not about protecting our IP. We want folks to get to find out information. That’s why we write finding aids, scan it, accession it. But, allowing bots to siphon it all up inefficiently was denying everyone access to it.
And if you think bots aren’t inefficient, explain why Facebook requests my robots.txt 10 times a second.
Timing and request patterns. The increase in traffic coincided with the increase in AI in the marketplace. Before, we’d get hit by bots in waves and we’d just suck it up for a day. Now it’s constant. The request patterns are deep deep solr requests, with far more filters than any human would ever use. These are expensive requests and the results aren’t any more informative that just scooping up the nicely formatted EAD/XML finding aids we provide.
And, TBH, I don’t care if it’s AI. I care that it’s rude. If the bots respected robots.txt then I’d be fine with them. They don’t and they break stuff for actual researchers.
I mean number of pirates correlates with global temperature. That doesn’t mean causation.
The rest of the indices would aso match for any archiving bot, or with any bit in search of big data. We must remember that big data is used for much more than AI. At the end of the day scraping is cheap, but very few companies in the world have access to the processing power to train that amount of data. That’s why it seems so illogical to me.
We are seeing how many LLM models which are results of a full train, per year? Ten? twenty? Even if they update and retrain often it’s not compatible with the amount of request people are implying as AI scraping that would put services into dos risk. Specially when I would think that any AI company would not try to scrap the same data twice.
I have also experience an increase in bot requests in my host. But I just think is a result of internet getting bigger, more people using internet with more diverse intentions, some ill some not. I’ve also experience a big increase on probing and attack attempts on general, and I don’t think it’s OpenAI trying some outdated Apache vulnerability on my server. Internet is just a bigger sea with more fish in it.
I just looked at my log for this morning. 23% of my total requests were from the useragent GoogleOther. Other visitors include GPTBot, SemanticScholarBot, and Turnitin. That’s the crawlers that are still trying after I’ve had Anubis on the site for over a month. It was much, much worse before, when they could crawl the site, instead of being blocked.
That doesn’t include the bots that lie about being bots. Looking back at an older screenshot of a monitors—I don’t have the logs themselves anymore—I seriously doubt I had 43,000 unique visitors using Windows per day in March.
Why would they request so many times a day the same data if the objective was AI model training. It makes zero sense.
Also google bots obeys robots.txt so they are easy to manage.
There may be tons of reasons google is crawling your website. From ad research to any kind of research. The only AI related use I can think of is RAG. But that would take some user requests aways because if the user got the info through the AI google response then they would not enter the website. I suppose that would suck for the website owner, but it won’t drastically increase the number of requests.
But for training I don’t see it, there’s no need at all to keep constantly scraping the same web for model training.
You’re right. AI didn’t just triple the traffic to my tiny archive’s site. It way more than tripled it. After implementing Anubis, we went from 3000 ‘unique’ visitors down to 20 in a half-day. Twenty is a much more expected number for a small college archive in the summer. That’s before I did any fine-tuning to Anubis, just the default settings.
I was getting constant outage reports. Now I’m not.
For us, it’s not about protecting our IP. We want folks to get to find out information. That’s why we write finding aids, scan it, accession it. But, allowing bots to siphon it all up inefficiently was denying everyone access to it.
And if you think bots aren’t inefficient, explain why Facebook requests my robots.txt 10 times a second.
How do you know those reduced request were AI companies and not any other purpose?
Timing and request patterns. The increase in traffic coincided with the increase in AI in the marketplace. Before, we’d get hit by bots in waves and we’d just suck it up for a day. Now it’s constant. The request patterns are deep deep solr requests, with far more filters than any human would ever use. These are expensive requests and the results aren’t any more informative that just scooping up the nicely formatted EAD/XML finding aids we provide.
And, TBH, I don’t care if it’s AI. I care that it’s rude. If the bots respected robots.txt then I’d be fine with them. They don’t and they break stuff for actual researchers.
I mean number of pirates correlates with global temperature. That doesn’t mean causation.
The rest of the indices would aso match for any archiving bot, or with any bit in search of big data. We must remember that big data is used for much more than AI. At the end of the day scraping is cheap, but very few companies in the world have access to the processing power to train that amount of data. That’s why it seems so illogical to me.
We are seeing how many LLM models which are results of a full train, per year? Ten? twenty? Even if they update and retrain often it’s not compatible with the amount of request people are implying as AI scraping that would put services into dos risk. Specially when I would think that any AI company would not try to scrap the same data twice.
I have also experience an increase in bot requests in my host. But I just think is a result of internet getting bigger, more people using internet with more diverse intentions, some ill some not. I’ve also experience a big increase on probing and attack attempts on general, and I don’t think it’s OpenAI trying some outdated Apache vulnerability on my server. Internet is just a bigger sea with more fish in it.
I just looked at my log for this morning. 23% of my total requests were from the useragent GoogleOther. Other visitors include GPTBot, SemanticScholarBot, and Turnitin. That’s the crawlers that are still trying after I’ve had Anubis on the site for over a month. It was much, much worse before, when they could crawl the site, instead of being blocked.
That doesn’t include the bots that lie about being bots. Looking back at an older screenshot of a monitors—I don’t have the logs themselves anymore—I seriously doubt I had 43,000 unique visitors using Windows per day in March.
Why would they request so many times a day the same data if the objective was AI model training. It makes zero sense.
Also google bots obeys robots.txt so they are easy to manage.
There may be tons of reasons google is crawling your website. From ad research to any kind of research. The only AI related use I can think of is RAG. But that would take some user requests aways because if the user got the info through the AI google response then they would not enter the website. I suppose that would suck for the website owner, but it won’t drastically increase the number of requests.
But for training I don’t see it, there’s no need at all to keep constantly scraping the same web for model training.