>People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable. Many people did not have a problem with taking copyright material in a respectful way that didn't kill the resource.
Has it be shown that perplexity engages in "DOSing"? I've heard of anecdotes of AI bots gone amuck, and maybe that's what's happening here, but cloudflare hasn't really shown that. All they did was set up a robots.txt and shown that perplexity bypassed it. There's probably archivers out there that's using youtube-dl to hit download from youtube at 1+Gbit/s, tens of times more than a typical viewer is downloading. Does that mean it's fair game to point to a random instance of someone using youtube-dl and characterizing that as "DOSing"?
The guy that runs shadertoy talked about how the hostingcost for his free site shot up because Openai kept crawling his site for training data (ignoring robot.txt) I think that’s bad, and I have also experimented a bit with using BeautifulSoup in the past to download ~2MB of pictures from Instagram. Do you think I’m holding an inconsistent position?
My point is that to invoke the "they're DOSing" excuse, you actually have to provide evidence it's happening in this specific instance, rather than vaguely gesturing at some class of entities (AI companies) and concluding that because some AI companies are DOSing, all AI companies are DOSing. Otherwise it's like youtube blocking all youtube-dl users for "DOSing" (some fraction of users arguably are), and then justifying their actions with "People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable".
I tell you of an instance where the biggest ai company is DOS’ing and your reply is that I haven’t proven all of them are doing it? Why do I waste my time on this stuff
Has it be shown that perplexity engages in "DOSing"? I've heard of anecdotes of AI bots gone amuck, and maybe that's what's happening here, but cloudflare hasn't really shown that. All they did was set up a robots.txt and shown that perplexity bypassed it. There's probably archivers out there that's using youtube-dl to hit download from youtube at 1+Gbit/s, tens of times more than a typical viewer is downloading. Does that mean it's fair game to point to a random instance of someone using youtube-dl and characterizing that as "DOSing"?