AI Chat: ChatGPT & AI News, Artificial Intelligence, OpenAI, Machine Learning AI Bots Are Overwhelming Wikipedia — Here's Why It Matters
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Apr 3, 2025 A surge of AI bots is putting immense pressure on Wikipedia’s infrastructure, significantly increasing bandwidth costs. This rise raises crucial questions about the sustainability of free knowledge online. The discussion also explores innovative solutions, like Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth, aimed at tackling the challenges posed by this bot traffic. Discover the implications for content accessibility and who ultimately pays the price.
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AI Bots Overwhelm Wikipedia
- Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50% since January 2024, not due to new users, but AI scrapers.
- This increased server load and costs significantly, impacting Wikipedia's operations.
Bot Traffic Costs
- Wikipedia's most expensive traffic (65%) comes from bots accessing less popular, harder-to-retrieve content.
- While bots represent around 35% of page views, their cost is disproportionately high due to accessing less frequently cached content.
AI Labyrinth and Developer Complaints
- Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth combats AI crawlers by feeding them AI-generated content, slowing them down.
- Software engineer Drew DeVault and Gurgly Osro complained about AI scrapers ignoring robot.txt and increasing bandwidth costs.