Many news outlets are reportedly blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages, apparently because they fear that AI companies will abuse fair use policies and train their models on the snapshots of old articles. This risks reducing society’s collective access to historical news stories, as well as other critical information, especially in an age where misinformation is in abundance, and AI large language models (LLMs) hallucinate convincing answers. Wired reports that 23 major publications currently block ia-archiverbot, Internet Archive’s commonly used crawler, including USA Today and The New York Times. Ironically, the publication pointed out that some of these outlets use Wayback Machine in their reporting.
Many libraries and newspaper offices used to have a rich repository of archived volumes, with people accessing them to gain insights into historical records. But as the world abandoned print journalism and preferred the convenience of online newspapers, these archives are no longer updated; we must rely on online archiving services like Wayback Machine to serve as the modern historical record.
