TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI
TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI
The crawler, dubbed Bytespider, is scraping the internet at 3,000 times the rate of other genAI tools like Anthropic.
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It's illegal when a regular person steals something, but it's innovation and courage, when a huge corporation steals something. Interesting how that works
Honestly it’s fucking angering. So much regulation and geo-restrictions and licensing schemes… but it’s cool that there are data brokers, and shit like this. On top of it all Chrome screwing us with manifest v3 and killing ad blocking on chrome. It’s already in canary build.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
Yes.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
Capitalism.
But muh stocks and bonds
The line must go UP.
They're not stealing your data, they're pirating it.
They’re not pirating it. They’re collecting it.
They’re not collecting it. They’re archiving it.
Oh, like the way back machine?
No, that's stealing /s
Is the problem that wayback machine isn't profiting from it?
It's not so much the lack of profits, more like the lack of kickbacks.
Aaron Schwartz killed himself over punishments for less
Worse punishments. For far less.
Should have waited until he was in the billionaire class before breaking the law.
Any regular person can scrape and use public data for AI use, it's not illegal for companies or individuals and it shouldn't be.
proceeds to download the entirety of one piece to train an AI
It will be the way we have all come to hate AI. Patriot act 2.0
Not that there's anything right about anything right now, but a web crawler crawling the web hardly seems newsworthy. It's not like everyone else's crawlers haven't been feeding data into giant AI mulchers for years now.
This is just "you know that thing everyone else does? Now the Chinese do it too! Boooo!"
What's being stolen
Do you even know what robots.txt is?
the scraper bots surely don't
And nobody in this scenario has done anything illegal.
If you have to defer to the law as justification for doing something purely selfish... then people will judge you to be an asshole.
Edit: Not you personally.
No they will judge you as being above the law (original commenter) and they will be wrong, which doesnt matter, as long as we feel continuity with our synthesized narrative.
Because truth doesnt matter. Our narrative just needs to be as loud as the opposition and then we can confuse people just like those in power... and then the impressionable people trying to understand whats going on or whats morally right will believe one side or the other and truth will not need to be discussed, because its not as catchy anyways.
Then people wont need to be trusted to form their own worldview based on facts, they can neatly choose between a few curated viewpoints, and holding views from multiple viewpoints will isolate them from relevance when they are shunned for not memeing their ideologies like everyone else.