Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites. Web crawlers have trawled the internet for information for decades. Without them, people would lose vitally important online tools, from Google Search to the Internet Archive's invaluable digital preservation work.

Do AI companies need to pay for the training data that powers their generative AI systems? The question is hotly contested in Silicon Valley and in a wave of lawsuits levied against tech behemoths like Meta, Google, and OpenAI. In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up. Today, at a Senate hearing on AI's impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. "It's not only morally right," said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing.

Artificial intelligence is helping us understand the language of animals. The technology can analyze hours of animal audio in a fraction of the time the same work would take for a human. "If you're manually trying to isolate these calls from audio files, it takes a really long time," said Kevin Coffey, a professor at the University of Washington. Coffey is also one of the creators of DeepSqueak, an A.I. program designed to pick up on high-pitched rat calls that human ears often miss. "In rats, these calls are often related to positive or negative effect," Coffey said.

For many years, researchers knew that rodents' squeaks tell a lot about how the animals are feeling. Much like a wagging tail on a dog, certain vocalizations indicate the rodents are happy. Conversely, other vocalizations indicate the rodents are stressed, or even depressed. But why were they interested in the rodents' moods? These researchers wanted to understand the rodents' responses to various stimuli.

In what is somehow the cutest science story of the new year so far, scientists at the University of Washington have announced a new artificial intelligence system for decoding mouse squeaks. Dubbed DeepSqueak, the software program can analyze rodent vocalizations and then pattern-match the audio to behaviors observed in laboratory settings. As such, the software can be used to partially decode the language of mice and other rodents. Researchers hope that the technology will be helpful in developing a broad range of medical and psychological studies. Published this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the study is based around a novel use of sonogram technology, which transforms an audio signal into an image or series of graphs.

Scientists at the University of Washington have released an interesting tool for studying the ultrasonic vocalizations of rats. It is a convolutional neural network capable of analyzing and categorizing rat calls. Studying rat vocalizations is time-consuming for a human. For one thing, most squeaks that rats make are above the 20kHz threshold of human hearing. So analysis requires slowing recordings down by as much as a factor of 20 to hear the highest vocalizations. This also means that one hour of audio becomes 20 hours of analysis.

We could blame Ms. Coffey's husband, Ben Berkowitz, 39, a vice president for digital at WNBC in New York, for turning the family's home into a techie wonderland. Along with that Echo, the family has Google Home, digital home security, a lock with keyless entry, and a Nest thermostat that insists on keeping the internal temperature at a crisp 62 degrees even when people are home. Ms. Coffey has so many apps on her phone monitoring her home that she has lost track of all the things they do. "I appreciate his efforts to computerize our house," she said of Mr. Berkowitz. "I just wish I could turn on a light without having to ask my phone to do it."

HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can identify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to verify leads. "Our vision has been to empower sales and marketing professionals by building technology that can extract information from text about what's happening in the world," said Kemvi founder and CEO Vedant Misra. And from the HubSpot perspective, Chief Strategy Officer Brad Coffey said the company had been looking for new ways to bring AI technology into its platform. He acknowledged that "AI" and "machine learning" are buzzwords that get thrown around a lot right now, but he found Kemvi particularly appealing because it addressed a real need among salespeople.