A new study from researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Data Provenance Initiative has highlighted a significant decrease in available content for training artificial intelligence (AI) models. The study, which examined 14,000 web domains included in commonly used AI training data sets, reveals an "emerging crisis in consent" as publishers and online platforms take measures to block data harvesting. The trend has resulted in restrictions in three datasets (C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma) affecting 5% of all data and 25% of data from high-quality sources using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a file called robots.txt. The study also found websites' terms of service had restricted 45% of the data in the C4 dataset. The study's lead author, Shayne Longpre, warns that this decline in data consent will impact AI companies, researchers, academics, and noncommercial entities. Training data availability is integral to today's generative AI systems, and the limitations of using web data may pose challenges for various stakeholders in the field.
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