Wikipedia servers are struggling under pressure from AI scraping bots

Editor's take: AI bots have recently become the scourge of websites dealing with written content or other media types. From Wikipedia to the humble personal blog, no one is safe from the network sledgehammer wielded by OpenAI and other tech giants in search of fresh content to feed their AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization hosting Wikipedia and other widely popular websites, is raising concerns about AI scraper bots and their impact on the foundation's internet bandwidth. Demand for content hosted on Wikimedia servers has grown significantly since the beginning of 2024, with AI companies actively consuming an overwhelming amount of traffic to train their products. Wikimedia projects, which include some of the largest collections of knowledge and freely accessible media on the internet, are used by billions of people worldwide. Wikimedia Commons alone hosts 144 million images, videos, and other files shared under a public domain license, and it is especiall ... Read full article.