Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.

AI is the "most aggressive" example of "technologies that are not done 'for us' but 'to us.'"

Well said.

Deployment of Nepenthes and also Anubis (both described as "the nuclear option") are not hate. It's self-defense against pure selfish evil, projects are being sucked dry and some like ScummVM could only freakin' survive thanks to these tools.

Those AI companies and data scrapers/broker companies shall perish, and whoever wrote this headline at arstechnica shall step on Lego each morning for the next 6 months.

It's so sad we're burning coal and oil to generate heat and electricity for dumb shit like this.

This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍

The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt

AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes

AI tarpit 2: Iocaine

I’m so happy to see that ai poison is a thing

Nice ..... I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.

I suppose this will become an arms race, just like with ad-blockers and ad-blocker detection/circumvention measures.
There will be solutions for scraper-blockers/traps. Then those become more sophisticated. Then the scrapers become better again and so on.

I don't really see an end to this madness. Such a huge waste of resources.

Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.

This is surely trivial to detect. If the number of pages on the site is greater than some insanely high number then just drop all data from that site from the training data.

It's not like I can afford to compete with OpenAI on bandwidth, and they're burning through money with no cares already.

Nice one, but Cloudflare do it too.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

"Markov Babble" would make a great band name

Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They're a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.

Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they're a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you'd have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.

So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.

Such a stupid title, great software!

Wait… I just had an idea.

Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)

Why are the photos all ugly biological things

Btw, how about limiting clicks per second/minute, against distributed scraping? A user who clicks more than 3 links per second is not a person. Neither, if they do 50 in a minute. And if they are then blocked and switch to the next, it's still limited in bandwith they can occupy.

I've suggested things like this before. Scrapers grab data to train their models. So feed them poison.

Things like counter factual information, distorted images / audio, mislabeled images, outright falsehoods, false quotations, booby traps (that you can test for after the fact), fake names, fake data, non sequiturs, slanderous statements about people and brands etc.. And choose esoteric subjects to amplify the damage caused to the AI.

You could even have one AI generate the garbage that another ingests and shit out some new links every night until there is an entire corpus of trash for any scraper willing to take it all in. You can then try querying AIs about some of the booby traps and see if it elicits a response - then you could even sue the company stealing content or publicly shame them.