Robot fighter

As AI marches on, companies like OpenAI are scraping every site they can find.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that AI companies were running into a wall when it comes to gathering high-quality training data. Today, The New York Times detailed some of the ways companies have dealt with this. Unsurprisingly, it involves doing things that fall into the hazy gray area of AI copyright law.

IP land-grabs like this were always coming. In 2013, Dunner Law wrote about the precedent set by Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc:

As a result of these decisions, it is probable that other companies (e.g. Amazon.com) or library consortiums will seek ways to undertake their own digitization efforts all in the name of enhancing the public good.

It's time to update your site's robots.txt file.

Fighting robots has turned out to be different from what we expected. We were taught it would mean ray guns or fists a la Magnus, Robot Fighter, an extremely plausible comic book hero created by Russ Manning in 1963. Manning's other comics included Gold Key's Tarzan and the Star Wars newspaper strip: Magnus spans elements of both. Manning died aged 52. The Gold Key cover illustrations of his character come alive every time you look at them.