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Tech Life

Web-scraping bots

Tech Life

BBC

Tech News, News, Technology

4.4221 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We look at the impact data-scraping robots from AI firms are having on the online encyclopedia used by hundreds of millions of people.

Also in this edition of Tech Life: if you work in the fashion industry, if you are a fashion model, are you worried about AI ? A lot are, and we find out why.

And how do we prevent children from seeing online adult content ? Many parts of the world are requiring sites to verify the ages of their users. Now the biggest adult site argues that we need a better system.

Presenter: Chris Vallance Producer: Tom Quinn

(Image: A photo illustration of the Wikipedia logo displayed on a smartphone screen. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.

0:07.3

Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron.

0:10.5

Evil genius.

0:11.6

He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it.

0:15.5

That's like hiding at your own funeral.

0:17.1

Yeah, a big, great gig.

0:18.6

I'm Russell Kane.

0:19.6

Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius.

0:24.1

Becoming that rich, I'll say that at some level of genius.

0:26.4

It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

0:29.4

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

0:34.9

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

0:38.0

Hi, and welcome to TechLife on the BBC World Service, the program about technology and how it's changing all our lives.

0:46.2

I'm Chris Valence. This week we look at the impact data slurping robots from AI firms

0:52.0

are having on the online encyclopedia hundreds of millions of us

0:56.4

visit. I am, of course, talking about Wikipedia. If you work in the fashion industry, if you are

1:03.5

a fashion model, are you worried about AI? A lot are. And we'll be finding out why. And how do we keep children from seeing adult content?

1:13.6

Many parts of the world are requiring sites to check the ages of their users.

1:18.0

Now the world's biggest adult site argues we need a better system.

1:45.3

Music Now when you have a question, where do you turn to for answers?

1:51.3

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, gets billions of visits every year.

1:57.8

It's available in a wide range of global languages, and amazingly, it's all produced by unpaid volunteer editors. Lots of us turn to it for information, and so too do the AI

...

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