Our take: In “Look Mom, Libraries are in the New York Times!,” Rosalyn Metz responds to reports that an OpenAI agent tried to break into a University of New Mexico library site. She argues that libraries have faced this pressure for years. Drawing on firewall logs from one of Emory’s library applications, she shows 2.17 million bot hits in four weeks and points out that bots from Apple, Google, Meta and others are labeled as search traffic even when they likely feed AI training. Metz explains why robots.txt offers no real protection and warns that open access has costs that small, under-resourced institutions cannot absorb alone. Her post gives cultural heritage workers concrete evidence for a problem that library leaders often treat as a legal matter rather than a technical one.
