A new, ‘diabolical’ way to thwart Big Tech’s data-sucking AI bots: Feed them gibberish

A data point caught my eye recently. Bots generate more internet traffic to websites than humans now, according to cybersecurity company Thales.

This is being driven by a swarm of web crawlers unleashed by Big Tech companies and AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, that slurp up copyrighted content for free.

I’ve warned about these automated scrapers before. They’re increasingly sophisticated and persistent in their quest to harvest information to feed…