Data that powers AI is disappearing fast

For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models.

- KEVIN ROOSE

Now, that data is drying up.

Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training AI models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an MIT-led research group.

The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used AI training data sets, discovered an "emerging crisis in consent," as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets-called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma-5 per cent of all data, and 25 per cent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt.