The media and the farmer who planted parsley

Cloudfare is a company that hosts websites and provides traffic monitoring services. Its CEO has announced that they have developed an application capable of blocking artificial intelligence bots that crawl the internet. If one of their clients so chooses, their original content will not be used to train Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and their families. The question, of course, is whether the media will dare to take that step.

Comedians Faemino and Cansado had a segment in which they made fun of farmers who grow parsley. They couldn't understand why, having a fertile field, you would plant a herb that you get for free at the fishmonger's. A substantial portion of the media sector has become this farmer of jokes: they create articles with the sole purpose of being highlighted on social media and search engines, so they can monetize a few euros for every thousand screen appearances. It's a revenue, yes, but it absolutely devalues the product, which should be quality information (and not the click). With AI, this relationship is even more bloody, because in the vast majority of cases there's no traceability, and the chatbot returns a response without addressing the media outlet in question, or at least citing it. Now, no matter how well-intentioned the CEO of Cloudfare is, I find it hard to predict a promising future for his device in the media world. Tech companies have the sector camped out—it suits them, since they've managed to get their raw materials for free—and have already begun to make timid compensatory agreements with some big names in the sector. Or, in other words, they've applied the maxim of "divide and conquer," knowing that the hunger for a particular crust of bread will prevent the achievement of a whole loaf of bread for all.