Posted by BeauHD from the bad-bot dept.
Yesterday, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens asked AI company Anthropic why it was clogging up their server bandwidth without permission. “Do you really need to hit our servers a million times in 24 hours?” Wiens wrote on X. “You’re not only taking our content without paying, you’re tying up our DevOps resources. Not cool.” PC Gamer’s Jacob Fox reports: Assuming Wiens isn’t massively exaggerating, it’s no surprise that this is “typing up our devops resources.” A million “hits” per day would do it, and would certainly be enough to justify more than a little annoyance. The thing is, putting this bandwidth chugging in context only makes it more ridiculous, which is what Wiens is getting at. It’s not just that an AI company is seemingly clogging up server resources, but that it’s been expressly forbidden from using the content on its servers anyway.
There should be no reason for an AI company to hit the iFixit site because its terms of service state that “copying or distributing any Content, materials or design elements on the Site for any other purpose, including training a machine learning or AI model, is strictly prohibited without the express prior written permission of iFixit.” Unless it wants us to believe it’s not going to use any data it scrapes for these purposes, and it’s just doing it for… fun?
Well, whatever the case, iFixit’s Wiens decided to have some fun with it and ask Anthropic’s own AI, Claude, about the matter, saying to Anthropic, “Don’t ask me, ask Claude!” It seems that Claude agrees with iFixit, because when it’s asked what it should do if it was training a machine learning model and found the above writing in its terms of service, it responded, in no uncertain terms, “Do not use the content.” This is, as Wiens points out, something that could be seen if one simply accessed the terms of service.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. — Francis Bacon
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