What’s the best way to deal with the critical imbalance between AI’s hunger for online content and the compensation given to creators? In their lively DLD25 conversation, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and journalist Jochen Wegner discuss the challenges of protecting original content and the future of cybersecurity in the age of AI.
“I’m incredibly bullish on AI”, Prince says. “It’s an incredibly powerful technology.” But it’s also a technology that demands access to vast amounts of original content – so much so that AI companies scoop up far more data than regular search engines, the Cloudflare CEO points out.
“Ten years ago, for every one visitor that Google sent to you, they scraped two pages off of your site”, Prince says. “It’s now six to one: six scrapes from Google for every visitor they send you.” This makes it much harder to capitalize on original content, he adds. “The problem is that we’ve broken what is the original content creator model.”
This needs to be urgently addressed, he adds. “Even the smartest AI companies recognize that we have to fix that problem”, Prince says. “I’d love to get back to a place where humans get content for free, and the bots get charged.” The logic behind this system is obvious, he argues: “If you don’t have original content, then you don’t have any fuel for these systems.”
Cloudflare is able to distinguish bots from humans, even when bots attempt to disguise themselves, Prince explains. “Every single day it’s our team versus the most elite hackers from Russia, China, Iran, Israel, the United States”, he says. “So I actually feel pretty good about our ability to identify who are the bots and who are not the bots. That’s our job.”
Prince also discusses Cloudflare’s efforts to protect Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, noting that the company anticipated the attack in late 2021 and acted quickly to safeguard Ukraine’s internet infrastructure. “What I’m incredibly proud of is that – because we had that forewarning, because we had seen this before – we were able to provide our technology inside of Ukraine in order to protect them”, Prince says.
Watch the video for further details and learn why Prince is optimistic about AI’s ability to enhance cybersecurity and address the growing threats of disinformation and automated attacks.
