Web Scraping for Me, but Not for Thee ⇥ blog.ericgoldman.org

Kieran McCarthy:

In the last couple of weeks, Microsoft updated its general terms of use to prohibit scraping, harvesting, or similar extraction methods of its AI services.

Also in the couple of weeks, Microsoft affiliate OpenAI released a product called GPTbot, which is designed to scrape the entire internet.

And while they don’t admit this publicly, OpenAI has almost certainly already scraped the entire non-authwalled-Internet and used it is training data for GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4.

Nonetheless, without any obvious hints of irony, OpenAI’s own terms of use prohibits scraping.

McCarthy blames the courts, not lawyers for companies like Microsoft and OpenAI.