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AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50% | TechCrunch

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The Wikimedia Foundation says bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024 .

The reason isn't due to growing demand from humans, but from automated, data-hungry scrapers looking to train AI models.

The organization says that 65% of the most “expensive” traffic was from bots, compared to just 35% of overall pageviews.