Get the latest tech news

Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?

This report captures the impact that bots building datasets for AI model training are having on online cultural collections in early 2025. 1.

One of the first public alarms about bot behavior was posted on November 4, 2024, by Bridget Almas to a discussion group hosted by Lyrasis, a nonprofit member organization for library technology. On February 26, 2025, a team member from the Perseus Digital Library, a collection of works from the Greco-Roman world, announced on Bluesky, “Since last week, we’ve been experiencing continuing DOS [Denial of Service] from Alibaba subnets that are scraping our content for AI training.” In a blog post, Jason Casden of UNC Libraries described their version of this experience during a swarm in December of 2024: “In November, before we had this problem, we got something like 15 searches with the terms ‘Finnish’ and ‘music.’ Basically zero on the scale we operate.

Get the Android app