AI chatbots try to get to articles behind paywalls, and they do it the same way humans would: they search the web and social media for copies and excerpts, then piece it together. The difference is they can do it way faster, which raises the question of whether these bots should be allowed to do this at all. (Henk van Ess, Digital Digging)
Summary
- AI chatbots circumvent paywalls, reconstructing content from distributed online fragments.
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok achieve 50% success rates across major publications.
- Techniques include social media mining, pattern-based reconstruction, and leveraging archived versions.
