Cloudflare Gives the Supremes the Finger

The Supreme Court recently said that it was okay for AI companies to steal your copyrighted material to train the AI models. Not everyone thinks that is a wise decision.

Cloudflare has had an option since late last year for website owners who are Cloudflare customers to manually block AI bots from scraping their content. More than a million customers enabled that option. That is less than 5 percent of their customers.

Not only does allowing AI bots to scrape your intellectual property lessen the value of your IP, but it also decreases the likelihood that someone will actually visit your website at all, learning about your company, seeing your ads if you have them (which takes away revenue from you) and removing the option of people engaging you and giving you a little bit of their money.

So what did Cloudflare do?

They flipped the script and as a side benefit, flipped off the Supremes (which the Supremes didn’t say was a bad thing).

Because now, after the Supremes said it was okay for AI companies to steal your data, Cloudflare is making it more difficult for AI companies to do that.

That means that leaves the AI companies with the option of scraping social media (Meta can scan Facebook, Twitter can scrape X, etc.). The problem for the AI companies is the “quality” of the data they are scraping is, shall we say, not exactly great.

SO, it is now up to Cloudflare customers to actively say that they want the AI companies to steal their data. It is possible that some Cloudflare customers want the AI companies to steal their data, but I suspect that is a small percentage. I assume this is different from allowing Google or Bing to scrape your website to have you come up in their search results. Clearly Cloudflare knows who Google and Bing are and also who Meta and Twitter are and can distinguish the two.

At least now customers have a choice.

Credit: Security Week

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