I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differently.

I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.

Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article. Authors spend their blood, sweat and tears writing and then OpenAI comes to Hoover it up without a care in the world about license, copyright or what constitutes fair use. But don’t you dare scrape their slop.

> I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree

Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?

Off topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

> Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

Wild eh.

If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".

All this reactionary outrage in the comments is funny. And lame.

Yes, for the vast majority of the internet, serving traffic is near zero marginal cost. Not for LLMs though – those requests are orders of magnitude more expensive.

This isn't controversial at all, it's a well understood fact, outside of this irrationally angry thread at least. I don't know, maybe you don't understand the economic term "marginal cost", thus not understanding the limited scope of my statement.

If such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all. But no, they're rare edge cases, from a combination of shoddy scrapers and shoddy website implementations, including the lack of even basic throttling for expensive-to-serve resources.

The vast majority of websites handle AI traffic fine though, either because they don't have expensive to serve resources, or because they properly protect such resources from abuse.

If you're an edge case who is harmed by overly aggressive scrapers, take countermeasures. Everyone with that problem should, that's neither new nor controversial.