The New York Times Is Trying to Erase Itself From the Internet (And Blaming AI for It)

The New York Times just made a move that has internet historians seriously worried.

The newspaper started blocking the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library that preserves snapshots of websites so future generations can see what the internet looked like today. The reason? The Times says it's worried about AI companies scraping their archived content to train chatbots.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the biggest digital rights organizations in the world, fired back hard. They compared it to a newspaper asking libraries to stop keeping copies of old editions. The EFF pointed out that archiving web pages is a widely accepted practice (Google does it constantly) and has been recognized as fair use in court.

Here's why this matters to you: the Internet Archive is basically the library of the entire internet. When news articles get deleted, edited, or paywalled, the Archive is often the only place you can still read the original. If major publications start blocking it, huge chunks of digital history could simply vanish.

The irony is thick. The Times is so afraid of AI stealing its content that it's willing to let its own reporting disappear from the historical record. It's like burning your diary because you're afraid someone might photocopy it.

As reported by Hackaday and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Source: Hackaday