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AI is Rising Rapidly

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in various industries, revolutionizing the way we interact with technology. Its rapid rise and exponential growth have fueled both excitement and concern among businesses and individuals alike. While AI presents tremendous opportunities for innovation and efficiency, AI’s unchecked power to scrape content freely and indiscriminately has raised crucial questions about data privacy, ownership, and the need for robust defense mechanisms.

AI scrapes the internet for free

AI Trained by Scraping Content

One of the key aspects of AI’s growth is its ability to learn and evolve independently. However, in its quest for knowledge, AI systems have resorted to indiscriminate web scraping. Crawling the internet at will, they collect vast amounts of data, most-often without explicit consent from content owners. This practice has raised ethical concerns as it blurs the line between fair use and copyright infringement.

Did AI play fair?

The proliferation of AI has led to a startling revelation – AI can become a competitor to businesses by leveraging the firms’ very own data against them. This happens when AI systems mine and analyse data from various sources, including proprietary company information. Consequently, AI can replicate, optimize, and even outperform the business using the data as its arsenal.

Content Owners Miffed

As AI’s data-scraping activities continue unabated, content creators and owners have become increasingly aware, informed, and frustrated. The unauthorized use of their intellectual property and the potential loss of competitive advantage have led to a growing demand for more stringent safeguards.

With content owners voicing their concerns, legal challenges against AI’s data-scraping habits are on the rise. Courts are grappling with the intricacies of intellectual property rights in the digital age, setting precedents that will shape the future of AI’s relationship with online content.

Sites Raise Defenses

To protect their proprietary data from AI-driven competitors, commercial websites are starting to implement sophisticated security measures. Encryption, access controls, and enhanced firewalls are just a few examples of the defensive walls being erected to safeguard valuable information from AI’s prying algorithms.

AI’s Free Access Reduces

The days of AI freely roaming the internet and scraping data without restraint may be numbered. As legal battles intensify and content owners assert their rights, AI’s access to data may be restricted. This shift could herald the end of an era where AI enjoyed unrestricted access to the vast repository of information available online.

A Commercially-Driven Construct?

In response to AI’s data-scraping challenges, a new commercially driven data construct is emerging. Businesses are exploring data-sharing agreements, licensing models, and partnerships that offer controlled access to their data. These agreements seek to strike a balance between protecting proprietary information and fostering innovation through responsible AI use.

AI’s information fuel of the future

As AI continues its unstoppable ascent, data-driven commercial business’s operating on the internet is facing a challenge. The need to strike a balance between the potential benefits of AI and protecting data rights is evident. With legal battles brewing and businesses raising online defenses, a new era of data fueling for AI could be on the horizon. The question remains: Will the internet successfully defend itself against the relentless march of AI, or will data start to find its own way, directly into AI? Only time will tell.

AI, on the inside

Companies such as LinkedIn, that hold lots of deeply personal data, can’t expose that data to AI’s other than that of their own systems, but these companies will use AI prolifically with their own data. In fact, here is a quote from a paper written by LinkedIn “AI is like oxygen at LinkedIn – it powers everything that we do” [1]. This means that personal data can only be used to train internal AI systems and all the learning stays on the inside. Whilst this is an example of an isolated island of AI, its also an illustration of the fact that AII will soon be everywhere, as common as electricity.


[1] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/10/an-introduction-to-ai-at-linkedin

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