As of today, we are blocking AI training bots from crawling websites hosted on our servers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies are using bots (i.e. computer programs) to crawl the worldwide web to slurp up data for training their models. Much of this training is unfortunately done without due consideration of copyright. This may or may not matter to our clients, but it remains a grey area at minimum.
Crawling of websites hosted on our server have been increasing at a significant rate as the race for AI supremacy (or relevance) heats up. The frequency of these visits have reached a point where it represents the majority of traffic, placing a noticeable load on our servers, and risking slowing down service. Put simply, the situation has gotten of hand.
We have implemented restrictions that will block all visits from known AI training bots. Bye, bye!