Comment by unethical_ban
10 hours ago
I don't understand. What exactly are they doing, what are their goals? I'm not trying to argue, I genuinely don't get it.
edit: I guess I understand "AI bots scraping sites for data to feed LLM training" but what about the image serving?
Belated response as I called it a night over here in sunny Australia!
The image scraping bots are training for generative AI, I'm assuming.
As to why they literally scrape the same images hundreds of thousands of times?
I have no idea!
But I am not special, the bots have been doing it across the internet.
My main difference to other sites is that I operate a Tourism focused SAAS for local organisations and government tourist boards. Which means we have a very healthy amount of images being served per page across our sites.
We also do on the fly transformations for responsive images and formats. Which is all done through Cloudinary.
The Bytespider bot (Bytedance / TikTok) was the one that was being abusive for me.