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Wikipedia is struggling with voracious AI bot crawlers
Wikimedia has seen a 50 percent increase in bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content since January 2024 due to AI crawlers taking its content to train generative AI models. It has to find a way to address the problem, because it could slow down actual readers' access to its pages and assets.
No, the spike in usage came from AI crawlers, or automated programs scraping Wikimedia's openly licensed images, videos, articles and other files to train generative artificial intelligence models. When Jimmy Carter died in December, for instance, people's heightened interest in the video of his presidential debate with Ronald Reagan caused slow page load times for some users. The Washington Post reports that members of the White House's National Security Council have used personal Gmail accounts to conduct government business.
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