The insatiable hunger to feed #LLMs and #AI is parasitically draining the commons and public internet. Bandwidth costs are spiking as crawlers take data for training and information. For Wikipedia, the lack of attribution means no visitors, no donors, just cost. The #ethics of AI are failing here.
I saw Tim Karr on bluesky suggest that AIs should pay fees or a tax (should that be tariffs?) into a fund that supports public content. Services like Cloudflare and Fastly that defend against bots are evolving for crawlers. In #identity, the implications for #AgenticAI, #AI, and #NHI are vast.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
