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AI TRAINING
How AI’s Hunger for Content is Destroying the Web It Learned From?
The internet that fed artificial intelligence is now closing its gates, and the consequences may redefine how knowledge is created, owned, and shared
When OpenAI scraped the internet to train the first version of ChatGPT, the web was an open buffet of human expression — a sprawling, unguarded landscape of blog posts, research papers, Reddit debates, and centuries of literature waiting to be digitized. The data was there for the taking, and few understood its value. That era is over. What was once an abundant resource for training large language models (LLMs) has now become fiercely protected intellectual property.
Publishers are suing over past use and demanding payment for future access. Platforms that once quietly tolerated scraping are slamming their digital doors shut. Cloudflare, one of the internet’s most critical gatekeepers, has become its new bouncer — blocking AI crawlers by default unless they pay to enter.AI companies, in their relentless quest to consume everything the web has to offer, may have finally poisoned their own well.
