AI scraper bots driving scientific websites to a crawl

From the «kill it with fire» department:
Title: Web-Scraping AI Bots Cause Disruption For Scientific Databases and Journals
Author: feedback@slashdot.org
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:25:00 +0000
Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/172202/web-scraping-ai-bots-cause-disruption-for-scientific-databases-and-journals?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

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.

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