Editing Artificial intelligence (section)

===Case studies===
====Diaspora====
On 27 December 2024, the open-source social network project Diaspora noted that 70% of traffic across its infrastructure was in service of AI scrapers.<ref name="geraspora">https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163</ref> Particularly, the project noted that bots had followed links to crawl every individual edit in their [[#MediaWiki|MediaWiki]] instance, causing an exponential increase in the number of unique requests being made.

====LVFS====
The [https://fwupd.org/ Linux Vendor Firmware Service] (LVFS) provides a free central store of firmware updates, such as for UEFI motherboards and SSD controllers. This feature is integrated with many Linux distributions through the <code>fwupd</code> daemon. For situations where internet access is not permitted, the service allows users to make a local mirror of the entire 100+ GB store.

On 9 January 2025, the project announced that it would introduce a login wall around its mirror feature, citing unnecessary use of its bandwidth.<ref>https://lore.kernel.org/lvfs-announce/zDlhotSvKqnMDfkCKaE_u4-8uvWsgkuj18ifLBwrLN9vWWrIJjrYQ-QfhpY3xuwIXuZgzOVajW99ymoWmijTdngeFRVjM0BxhPZquUzbDfM=@hughsie.com/T/</ref> Up to 1,000 files may be downloaded per day without logging in. The author later mentioned on Mastodon that the problem appears to be caused by AI scraping.<ref>https://mastodon.social/@hughsie/113871373001227969</ref>

====LWN.net====
On 21 January 2025, Jonathan Corbet, maintainer of the Linux news website [[wikipedia:LWN.net|LWN.net]], made the following [https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664 post] to social.kernel.org:

<blockquote>
Should you be wondering why @LWN #LWN is occasionally sluggish... since the new year, the DDOS onslaughts from AI-scraper bots has picked up considerably. Only a small fraction of our traffic is serving actual human readers at this point. At times, some bot decides to hit us from hundreds of IP addresses at once, clogging the works. They don't identify themselves as bots, and robots.txt is the only thing they *don't* read off the site.

This is beyond unsustainable. We are going to have to put time into deploying some sort of active defenses just to keep the site online. I think I'd even rather be writing about accounting systems than dealing with this cr*p. And it's not just us, of course; this behavior is going to wreck the net even more than it's already wrecked.
</blockquote>

He later commented:<ref>https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-bots-paralyze-Linux-news-site-and-others-10252162.html</ref>

<blockquote>
We do indeed see a kind of pattern. Every IP stays below the threshold for our fuses, but the overload is overwhelming. Any form of active defense will probably have to figure out to block entire subnets instead of individual addresses, and even that might not be enough.
</blockquote>

====MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation====
[[wikipedia:MediaWiki|MediaWiki]] is of particular interest to LLM training due to the vast amount of factual, plain-text content wikis tend to hold. While [[wikipedia:Wikipedia|Wikipedia]] and the [[wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation|Wikimedia Foundation]] host the most well-known wikis, numerous smaller wikis exist thanks to the work of many independent editors. The strength of wiki architecture is its ability for every edit to be audited by anyone, at any time - you can still view [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1 the first edit to Wikipedia] from 2002. This makes wikis a hybrid of a static website and a dynamic web app, which becomes problematic when poorly-designed bots attempt to scrape them.<ref name="geraspora" />

<!-- COI alert: I, [[User:kirb]], am an admin for The Apple Wiki. Hopefully this is neutral enough?
-->The Apple Wiki, which documents internal details of Apple's hardware and software, holds more than 50,000 articles. On 2 August 2024, with a repeat occurrence on 5 January 2025, the service was disrupted by scraping efforts.<ref>https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/The_Apple_Wiki:Community_portal#Bot_traffic_abuse</ref> The wiki contains a considerable amount of information that is scraped by legitimate security research tools, making it difficult for the website to block non-legitimate requests. Efforts to block unethical scraping and protect the wiki have disrupted these legitimate tools. The large article count, combined with more than 280,000 total edits over the wiki's lifetime, create an untenable situation where it is simply not possible to scrape the website without causing significant service disruption.

On 1 April 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation indicated that its infrastructure has been under increasing pressure from content scraping bots since January 2024, with the particularly critical metric that "65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots", despite estimating 35% of all traffic as coming from bots. The bots create traffic patterns that are significantly unlike human traffic patterns, effectively bypassing Wikimedia's caching infrastructure and placing significant load on the core servers. A blog post provides an example where bot traffic caused the [[wikipedia:Wikimedia Commons|Wikimedia Commons]] service to become unstable during a human traffic spike. The Foundation is considering introduction of a Responsible Use of Infrastructure policy to ensure the continued stability of their services.<ref>https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/</ref>

====Perplexity AI and news outlets====
[[Perplexity AI]], founded in August 2022, is a large language model that aims to be viewed as a general search engine. It encourages users to consume news through its summaries of stories.

On 15 June 2024, an investigation by Apple blog MacStories found that Perplexity does not follow its own documented policies when accessing content the user requests from the web. In their testing, the scraper pretended to be Chrome 111 running on Windows 10, connecting from an IP address not found in Perplexity's publicly-listed IP address ranges.<ref>https://rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-is-lying-about-its-user-agent/</ref> MacStories' findings were confirmed by a WIRED investigation.<ref>https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/</ref> Perplexity responded by removing its list of IP addresses.

On 27 June 2024, [[Amazon]] announced an investigation into Perplexity AI, suggesting the behavior may be considered abusive under Amazon Web Services terms of service:<ref name="perplexity-aws">https://www.wired.com/story/aws-perplexity-bot-scraping-investigation/</ref>

<blockquote>
"AWS's terms of service prohibit abusive and illegal activities and our customers are responsible for complying with those terms," [AWS spokesperson Patrick] Neighorn said in a statement. "We routinely receive reports of alleged abuse from a variety of sources and engage our customers to understand those reports."
</blockquote>

====Read the Docs====
In an early example, on 25 July 2024, open source documentation website Read the Docs detailed cases of abusive bots downloading large amounts of content from the service. Particularly, the significant range of IP addresses used in an aggressive manner rendered existing rate limiting ineffective. Taking action to block traffic identified by Cloudflare as "AI crawlers" reduced bandwidth requirements by 75%, at a cost saving of $1,500 USD/month.<ref>https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/</ref>

====SourceHut and Fedora Linux====
On 15 March 2025, an infrastructure manager for the [[wikipedia:Fedora Linux|Fedora Linux]] open source project discussed an assumed large language model crawling attack against the Prague.io Git source code hosting service. The project made the decision to block the entire country of Brazil for some time, while also blocking access to certain repositories whose traffic was creating significant CPU usage.<ref>https://www.scrye.com/blogs/nirik/posts/2025/03/15/mid-march-infra-bits-2025/</ref><ref>https://www.scrye.com/blogs/nirik/posts/2025/03/29/late-march-infra-bits-2025/</ref>

On 17 March 2025, the Git source code host SourceHut announced that the service was being disrupted by large language model crawlers. Mitigations deployed to reduce disruption involved requiring login for some areas of the service, and blocking IP ranges of cloud providers, affecting legitimate use of the website by its users.<ref>https://status.sr.ht/issues/2025-03-17-git.sr.ht-llms/</ref> In response to the event, SourceHut founder Drew DeVault wrote a blog post entitled "[https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face]", discussing his frustrations with having ongoing and ever-adapting attacks that must be addressed in a timely fashion to reduce disruption to legitimate SourceHut users. DeVault estimates that between "20-100%" of his time is now spent addressing such attacks.