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Cloudflare launches a tool to combat AI bots (techcrunch.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.

Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s robots.txt, the text file that tells bots which pages they can access on a website. But, as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-combating tool, not all AI scrapers respect this.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I’m not much of a programmer and I don’t host any public sites, but how feasible would it be to build an equivalent of Night Shade but for LLMs that site operators could run?

I’m thinking strategies akin to embedding loads of unrendered links to pages full of junk text. Possibly have the junk text generated by LLMs and worsened via creative scripting.

It would certainly cost more bandwidth but might also reveal more bad actors. Are modern scrapers sophisticated enough to not be fooled into pulling in that sort of junk data? Are there any existing projects doing this sort of thing?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

To get more direct to the point you could use those unrendered dummy links to ban whatever IPs click them.

With the vast amounts of training data and how curated they're becoming (Llama and Claude are going that direction) it's infeasible to actually poison a large model to this degree.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Sure, but it adds cost. An OCR scrape then a matching with the html parse.

Regarding ideas of IP banning, proxies are already heavily leveraged.

This is an ugly fight