This Week in Web 3 - 24/7/23
Adam Prosser
Founder - UK Digital Marketing Agency | ? Generating Leads For SME's ? Free Initial Consultation In-Person or Online
Robots, paywalls and API’s are at the forefront of web related news at the moment. In this newsletter, we take an in-depth look at why these parts of the online world have become such a hot topic for debate.?
What is an API?
An Application Programming Interface, (API), is a piece of software that enables two or more computers to interact with one another. API’s are incredibly useful for creating automations such as scheduled posts on social media or embedding content from another website onto your own.?
APIs have been a part of the Web since the rise of Web 2.0 at the turn of the millennium. Historically their use was widespread, but as bad actors began to exploit API’s, restrictions on what they are able to do has limited their implementation.?
The rise of bots, crawlers and AI.?
APIs are the main gateway by which bots are able to access social media platforms and other websites. Since the introduction of APIs, web developers have been desperate to find ways to prevent spam bots whilst also allowing genuinely helpful applications to get through.?
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The explosion of AI development in recent years has reignited the debate surrounding APIs. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT use API’s to scan large parts of a website to generate responses to questions. This collection of data from websites that forms an AI’s language model is known as a ‘corpus’.?
Information is an extremely valuable resource in the modern age of the internet. Owners of large social media platforms such as Reddit and Twitter, (now known as ‘X’) have become increasingly concerned that the content and information created by their user base is being stolen by AI driven searches.?
The main concern is that if users are able to get the same quality of content from AI searches, they will not visit the platform itself. The most obvious example of this currently is the Chrome browser extension ‘ChatGPT for YouTube’ that summarises YouTube videos for the user without the need for them to watch them.?