Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

Meta has dropped the word 'train' from its commercial terms of service (TOS) following backlash over its AI scraping policy. The company has made the change without adding language to respect robots.txt, which is a standard web protocol that instructs search engines and other crawlers not to index certain pages. Meta's policy change comes after an AI research group, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, accused the company of trying to restrict access to its data. The Wayback Machine uses web scraping to create a digital archive of the web, and Meta's policy change was seen as an attempt to prevent the archive from accessing its data. However, Meta has maintained that its policy change was not intended to target the Wayback Machine specifically, but rather to clarify its commercial TOS. The company has dropped the word 'train' from its policy, which previously stated that it would not allow data scraping for the purpose of training AI models. The change is seen as a victory for the AI research community, but the issue of web scraping and data access remains a contentious topic.