Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions.

The article discusses the impact of the "Really Simple Licensing" (RSL) initiative on AI firms that rely on web scraping to train their models. RSL aims to provide a simple and standardized way for creators to get paid for their content being used in AI systems. The article states that AI companies have been "blindsided" by the increasingly detailed robots.txt instructions being used by website owners to control access to their content. This suggests that AI firms may have been caught off guard by the growing efforts to restrict and monetize the use of online data for training AI models. The article suggests that the RSL framework could make it easier for creators to enforce their rights and receive compensation when their content is used by AI systems. This could lead to a shift in the business models and practices of AI companies, which may need to adapt to this new landscape where the rights of content creators are more actively enforced.