> Although Common Crawl has been essential to the development of many text-based generative AI tools, it was not designed with AI in mind. Founded in 2007, the San Francisco–based organization was best known prior to the AI boom for its value as a research tool. “Common Crawl is caught up in this conflict about copyright and generative AI,” says Stefan Baack, a data analyst at the Mozilla Foundation who recently published a report on Common Crawl’s role in AI training. “For many years it was a small niche project that almost nobody knew about.”
> Prior to 2023, Common Crawl did not receive a single request to redact data. Now, in addition to the requests from the New York Times and this group of Danish publishers, it’s also fielding an uptick of requests that have not been made public.