There are no good mechanisms to reliably block AI crawlers while still sharing openly online.
The core issue is that the current mechanism to block crawlers via robot.txt was designed with search engines in mind and only works per domain, not per individual user or post of a user. As The Verge reports, "For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all."
Related Issues by Justice Area
Amazon's AI recruitment tool discriminated against women.
The online giant created its own recruitment tool to help evaluate the resumes of people who for software developer positions. It was soon discovered that the algorithm was poorly ranking applications from people it assumed were women. This is because it was trained on a dataset that consisted primarily of men’s resumes that were submitted to the company over the past decade. The system was taught to penalized any resume that included the word “women’s” or listed that the candidate graduated from a couple of specific women’s-only universities. Use of the software has been discontinued.
Economic Justice Gender Justice Issue 2013Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency's Michigan Integrated Data Automated System incorrectly flagged about 40,000 people as committing unemployment fraud during the 2013–2015 period.
The state worked to fix the problems caused by the AI system, but the damage has major: the wrongly accused Michigan residents have been subjected to denied unemployment benefits, fines, repossessions, and even bankruptcy.
Economic Justice Issue 2023AI is poised to exacerbate the Black-white wealth gap in the United States.
The median wealth amassed by Black households in the United States is just 15 percent of what that of white households. That means that Black families have about $44,900 USD to their $285,000 USD. This is the result of many systemic factors that stretch all the way back to the the time of chattel slavery. The McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility predicts that AI will add about $7 trillion USD to the global economy each year, with nearly $2 trillion USD of that concentrated in the U.S. But it also warns that if generative AI technology development continues on its current trajectory, it will widen that wealth gap. The prediction is that by 2045, it will grow by a whopping $43 billion USD every year.
Economic Justice Racial Justice Issue 2023A 2023 report from Internet Watch Foundation AI is increasingly being used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Researchers examined 20,254 AI-generated images that were posted to one dark web CSAM forum over the course of one month and a preliminary review found that 11,108 of them were likely criminal. Ultimately, 2,978 were deemed criminal per UK law. They also concluded that the AI-generated images are increasingly becoming visually indistinguishable from CSAM that involve real people, that much of it focuses on celebrity children and people who have previously been abused, and that there is potential for massive growth in this criminal area.
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