The Great AI Content Heist: How Bots Are Devouring the Internet – and How We Can Fight Back
An investigation found AI companies scraped over 15.8 million YouTube videos from more than 2 million channels without permission to train models, often violating platform terms and copyright. Automated bots from AI labs now make up about 30% of global web traffic, with some sites seeing up to 97% of visits from scrapers. Many bots ignore robots.txt rules and disguise their identities to evade detection. Publishers are responding with technical blocks and lawsuits.