ET Explainer: Cloudflare's new tool aims to block AI bots from scraping website content

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Cloudflare last week launched a new tool to tackle artificial intelligence (AI) bots that crawl websites and scrape their content indiscriminately. It comes at a time when content publishers are increasingly anxious about their unique works being turned into fodder for AI models.

Here’s a closer look at the tool and why it matters.

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What does the tool do?

Cloudflare launched an ‘easy button’ that will block all AI bots, fine-tuning its machine learning models to identify and block even those that try to impersonate real people.

AI bots are automated programmes that browse the internet and “scrape” or collect vast amounts of data to train large language models.

“Customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly,” Cloudflare wrote in a blog. “We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection.”

The new feature will be available to all customers, including those on the free tier, and can be enabled in their Cloudflare dashboards.

Why is it significant?

Globally, news and content publishers have been embroiled in a tussle with AI companies to prevent the unauthorised use of their content to train AI models