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Title: Web-Scraping AI Bots Cause Disruption For Scientific Databases and
Journals

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/1...

Automated web-scraping bots seeking training data for AI models are flooding
scientific databases and academic journals with traffic volumes that render
many sites unusable. The online image repository DiscoverLife, which contains
nearly 3 million species photographs, started receiving millions of daily
hits in February this year that slowed the site to the point that it no
longer loaded, Nature reported Monday. The surge has intensified since the
release of DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that demonstrated
effective AI could be built with fewer computational resources than
previously thought. This revelation triggered what industry observers
describe as an "explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train
this type of model." The Confederation of Open Access Repositories reported
that more than 90% of 66 surveyed members experienced AI bot scraping, with
roughly two-thirds suffering service disruptions. Medical journal publisher
BMJ has seen bot traffic surpass legitimate user activity, overloading
servers and interrupting customer services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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