Making AI Headlines · Page 5
The Redline Is Smaller Than the Argument
· New York time
Meta has removed the word “train” from commercial terms scheduled to take effect October 30 after criticism of the policy. The company has not added language committing to respect robots.txt, the website mechanism used to communicate crawler preferences. Legal experts had warned that the earlier language appeared to grant broad permission to scrape websites linked from business pages. Experts speaking to Nieman Lab suggested the policy could allow Meta to obtain material for AI training without the licensing payments publishers might otherwise seek. Those were assessments of the terms, not established outcomes. The change highlights the gap between editing a document and resolving the commercial questions behind it. Businesses need to understand what permission they grant by maintaining a page, while publishers have an interest in how their linked material may be used. A single removed word can be meaningful, but it is not a substitute for examining the remaining language. The relevant unit of analysis is the policy, not the size of the redline. Terms of service occupy a peculiar literary genre: consequential enough to govern a relationship, yet presented in a form that makes a refrigerator manual feel like a beach read. This revision has given one verb an unusually eventful career.
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