Bots are currently scraping the internet for LLM training data at unprecedented rates[1][2][3], driving up costs and destabilizing public-facing websites. I want to talk about how this has been particularly difficult for wikis, and has gotten much worse in the last few months.
On the plus side, this isn’t a problem with AI, this is a problem with AI companies having more investment money than they know what to do with. The moment the hype fades and they don’t want to hemmorage money scraping every wiki on the internet thousands of times per day, this traffic will go back to a far more sane amount.
So we should make more wikis filled with poison data… got it! ;)
It will probably go down, but the process itself is kind of unavoidable for training LLMs, so I doubt things will go back to how they were before.