If you’ve visited the Debevoise Data Blog recently, you will have noticed that before you can read a post, you now have to click through a CAPTCHA. We debated whether to add this small bit of friction, but ultimately decided that it was necessary. Over the past few months, we noticed a sharp rise in traffic to our blog from what looks like training or retrieval by large language models. We are strong believers in the value of AI and proud of the content that we publish here. So, while we are happy to make it freely available to clients, students, academics, and policymakers, we are also running a business, and we need to take reasonable steps to limit the ability of machines to harvest and repurpose our work, for easy use without attribution, by others who are offering competing services.
So, we are experimenting with a measure that some of our publisher clients have taken, adding Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA as a basic gate that allows our readers access to our content, albeit with a small additional step, while blocking the GenAI bots. We are monitoring our traffic to see if this achieves the desired result, and will update our readers on what we find. As always, we appreciate your interest in the Debevoise Data Blog and hope this change does not impact your ability to engage with our content. If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please direct them to the blog editor, Avi Gesser.
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The cover art used in this blog post was generated by ChatGPT-5.
