I never even really thought about this where a lot of the applications that use AI Chatbots have to get their information from somewhere. For up to date information, it needs to scour the web for live information. Because of that, apparently companies are starting to charge premiums or even block open access to company bots. I know there are lawsuits as well from authors who allege that bots such as ChatGPT explicitly use information from their work when they spit out details. Then today I was reading how the platform Reddit began charging premium API access fees because of data scraping.
This is an interesting new type of concern that you would have to potentially address if you have any kind of business with data and information that a bot may find interesting to scrape daily. I do wonder if for a company like Reddit on whether the concern is more about say bandwidth cost or simply the fact that someone else is using all their work without having to attract people in generating information themselves. So, in that case it’s more about not wanting to be taken advantage of.
Of course, the drawback is this probably restricts access to resources in these ways from smaller organizations that are actually just using it in simple way. Can’t really blame people for wanting some of that revenue I guess if the company are using their work to make profit.