AI Discovers Yet Another Way To Kill Our Cultural Heritage
You’re likely familiar with the kleptomania that AI displays, ransacking any and all content posted to the web. Artists are seeing AI abscond with their creations and using them as training data or even just giving them out for free and large corporations are seeing the actual watermark they use to prove ownership of their art stolen by AI bots. This is having a negative impact on the creative world, but a new survey shows that AI bots are finding new ways to plunder our cultural heritage.
GLAM-E Lab is a joint initiative studying the effect AI has on galleries, libraries, archives, and museums which recently conducted a survey with 43 respondents, and 39 had experienced a recent increase in traffic. Of those, 27 can prove the traffic is coming from AI bots harvesting assets, with an additional seven believing that is the case but lack the resources to prove it.
Therein lies the problem, museums and the like don’t have the budget to hire a large IT team to keep their sites up. With AI bots ignoring robots.txt, alternative methods need to be found to at least reduce the traffic generated by AI harvesting. They are of course somewhat concerned about AI harvesting their online exhibits, but that’s not the real issue. The real problem is that they can’t handle the increased traffic and have no budget to spend on additional servers to deal with it.
We may soon see some museums and archives disappear from the web entirely, because the AI bots have unintentionally DDoSed them.
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