At the dawn of the digital age, the web was conceived as a space of free access to knowledge, an ocean of information where anyone could navigate without restrictions. However, in this borderless world, humans are not the only ones traversing its waters. In the shadows of the internet, in the lines of code that few see, bots have taken control. They are not the androids of science fiction nor the artificial intelligences that assist us with the voice of a virtual assistant, but much more insidious entities: content-extraction bots.
For years, the web has been teeming with crawlers designed to gather information for a variety of purposes. From Google's indexing bots to market research tools, automation has been a fundamental cog in the internet machine. But what was once an ecosystem dominated by search engines and analytics firms has now become a feast for artificial intelligence. Bots no longer just collect links or metadata; now they devour entire texts, images, databases, and any material they can use to train their models.
The rise of generative AI has led to an explosion in the demand for data. Models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Doubao need massive amounts of information to improve their responsiveness. And what better source of data than the internet itself? What seemed like a utopia a few years ago is now common practice: AI companies send their bots to crawl the web, collecting information from millions of sites, often without the consent of their owners.
But not all bots play fair . Some, like OpenAI's GPTBot or Anthropic's ClaudeBot, have been relatively transparent about their activity and have offered the option to be blocked via the robots.txt file. Others, however, operate more opaquely, disguising themselves as legitimate traffic or using proxy servers to hide their origin. This is the case with Perplexity, which has been repeatedly criticized for posing as a human visitor while extracting content from web pages without revealing its true identity.
One of the most intriguing names on this list is Bytespider, the bot from ByteDance, TikTok's parent company. Unlike other crawlers that focus on text, Bytespider specializes in collecting images and videos, essential elements for training the visual recognition algorithms and multimodal capabilities of its AI models. With a social network as influential as TikTok under its control, the amount of data ByteDance handles is immeasurable, and its bot is just another extension of its digital reach.
This list also includes Amazonbot, Amazon's crawler that feeds Alexa's responses, and other lesser-known but equally voracious bots. The AI bot ecosystem is expanding, and each new tool launched on the market needs more and more data to remain competitive. The technological race to develop the best artificial intelligence has turned the web into a massive data mining field where the boundaries between public and private are increasingly blurred.
The problem is that this data collection is not harmless. Behind every extracted article is a content creator who has dedicated time and effort to generating it. The writers, journalists, academics, and companies that build the internet as we know it receive no recognition or compensation when their work is absorbed by an AI model. On the contrary, in many cases, these models generate responses based on copied content without citing the original source, presenting it as their own and affecting the web traffic of those who depend on digital visibility to survive.
The Reddit case aptly illustrates this dilemma. In 2023, Google agreed to pay $60 million annually for access to Reddit's vast database of user-generated comments. This transaction is merely the tip of the iceberg of a model in which content created by ordinary people is treated as an exploitable resource without its creators having any say in the negotiations. If companies as large as Reddit can be drawn into these kinds of agreements, what hope is there for small, independent creators?
The situation becomes even more complex when AI bots begin operating undetected. Many of these tools don't use clear names, instead masking their activities behind content delivery networks, cloud servers, or dynamic IP addresses. This means that even websites attempting to block these crawlers may be unwittingly being exploited. OpenAI itself, in an effort to distance itself from the most aggressive scraping practices, has prohibited its clients from using ChatGPT to generate copyright-infringing content. But this measure is insufficient when data collection itself continues on a massive scale.
As AI advances and becomes more sophisticated, content-extracting bots are also evolving. They are no longer limited to copying text or images, but can analyze writing patterns, reconstruct narrative structures, and even generate automatic summaries of the articles they crawl. In other words, they are not only consuming content, but also learning to replicate and reframe it with increasing accuracy.
Does this mean the end of original content? Not necessarily. But it does represent an unprecedented challenge to authorship in the digital age. If artificial intelligence can rewrite, interpret, and adapt content without attribution or compensation, the relationship between creators and consumers of information becomes asymmetrical. While humans remain subject to intellectual property and copyright laws, AI models benefit from a legal gray area that allows them to appropriate information without clear restrictions.
The battle for digital independence is not just a matter of cybersecurity or control over the web, but a fight for the future of creativity and knowledge ownership. The internet has always been a space for the exchange of ideas, but the arrival of AI bots has changed the game. Today, every post, every image, and every line of code can become part of the machinery of an artificial intelligence model without its author's knowledge.
The key question is not whether these technologies should exist, but how they should be regulated. Is it acceptable for AI to feed off the work of millions of creators without a fair compensation structure? Should governments intervene to establish stricter regulations on data collection online? Or are we doomed to an internet where human content becomes mere fuel for machines?
Whatever the answer, one thing is certain: the bot feast has begun, and only time will tell if the web manages to regain its balance or if, on the contrary, we end up being mere data providers in the age of artificial intelligence.