Gabriele SveltoWhen talking about the energy consumed by LLMs don't be fooled by arguments focusing solely on the direct power consumption of these models, because they are externalizing a lot of it. Browsers are now doing proof-of-work calculations to access many websites, because websites need to protect themselves from AI scrapers. That takes power! Let that sink in: every computer, tablet or phone on earth is now consuming more power *every time it accesses a webpage* because of "AI".
2¢
Loïc Denuzière@Qbitzerre
The problem is not "X exists", but "X has reached absurd amounts of traffic that everyone now has to mitigate against". That is from AI.
@gabrielesvelto
The problem is not "X exists", but "X has reached absurd amounts of traffic that everyone now has to mitigate against". That is from AI.
@gabrielesvelto
@tarmil @gabrielesvelto perhaps. Does the existence of AI incentivize more entities to deploy spidering than in the past? I suppose the premise is that grabbing content is a more compelling prospect if one can employ processing with greater ROI than simply indexing and/or mirroring.
It makes some sense but is hardly assured.
Michael Gale@Qbitzerre @tarmil @gabrielesvelto https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/ai_web_crawlers_are_destroying/
Not just perhaps. Not just many more entities. Far, far more aggressive crawling. Crawling that doesn't take everything and leave, it takes everything and then starts again. Crawling that doesnt respect robots.txt in the slightest.
