The New York Times Is Trying to Erase the Internet's Memory, and It's Using AI as the Excuse

The New York Times just started blocking the Internet Archive, the nonprofit that saves copies of websites so future generations can look back at them, like a library for the internet.

Their reason? They're worried about AI bots scraping their articles to train language models. But here's the problem: the Internet Archive isn't an AI company. It's literally a digital library. Blocking it doesn't stop AI scrapers. It just means nobody will have a saved copy of what the Times published.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (a major digital rights organization) came out swinging against this move. They compared it to a newspaper telling libraries to stop keeping copies of their old editions. In a world where most news exists only online, blocking archival means those articles could just... disappear.

The EFF also pointed out that saving copies of web pages for search purposes is already legal. Courts have said it's fair use. Google does it every single day.

So in trying to protect themselves from AI, the Times may have accidentally started erasing the historical record of the internet. That's a plot twist nobody asked for. As reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via Hackaday.

Source: Hackaday