Meanwhile, bot-protection companies like DataDome have been offering services to deter scraping for years and have recently seen a huge shift in response to the rise of generative AI. CEO Benjamin Fabre told WIRED that he has seen a surge in customers looking for protection against AI-related scrapers. “Seventy percent of our customers reach out to us asking to make sure DataDome is blocking ChatGPT” and other large language models, he says.
Although companies like DataDome are well-established, they cater to large corporations and charge accordingly; they’re usually not accessible to individuals. Kudurru’s arrival, then, is promising precisely because it is offering a free tool aimed at regular people.
However, Kudurru does not provide a comprehensive or long-term solution for artists who wish to prevent AI scraping. Its creators themselves see it as a temporary measure while waiting for effective regulations or laws to govern AI training. Many artist advocates doubt that these companies will willingly cease scraping for training data.
Neil Turkewitz, a copyright activist, believes that AI generators are only a temporary obstacle rather than a complete solution for the industry. He supports their development and usage, emphasizing the importance of not relying solely on these technical measures.
“I appreciate efforts made to create tools that assist artists,” Crabapple expresses. “However, these tools ultimately place the responsibility on us, which is not where it should lie. We should not have to constantly defend our work from being stolen and exploited by massive corporations. The only viable resolution to this issue is through legislation.”
A larger-scale, permanent change in how generators train will likely need to come from governments; it is highly unlikely that the larger generative AI companies will stop web scraping voluntarily. Some are attempting to ameliorate critics by creating opt-out features, where people who don’t want their work to be used can ask to be removed from future training sets. These measures have been viewed as half-baked at best by many artists, who want to see a world in which training takes place only if they’ve opted into participation.
To make matters worse, companies have started developing their own opt-in protocols one by one rather than settling on a common system, making it time-consuming for artists to withdraw their work from each individual generator. (Spawning previously worked on an early opt-out tool for Have I Been Trained? but sees the fragmentation as “disappointing,” according to Meyer.)
The European Union has made significant progress in establishing legal frameworks for obtaining consent from artists for AI training. Toorenent expresses satisfaction with the progress and believes that the AI Act could mark the start of regulating the unrestricted nature of training. However, other regions would need to catch up, and the AI Act primarily empowers artists to opt out rather than shifting towards an opt-in model. In simpler terms, achieving a training structure based on voluntary participation is still a distant goal worldwide. Meanwhile, there is Kudurru to consider.
