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Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

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Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#121
post #86
post #30

This reminds me of how GPT-2/3/J came across https://reddit.com/r/counting , wherein redditors repeatedly post incremental numbers to count to infinity. It considered their usernames, like SolidGoldMagikarp, such common strings on the Internet that, during tokenization, it treated them as top-level tokens of their own. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solid... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAx…

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful. In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence…

> I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs

I mean, it's inherent to LLMs to be unable to answer "I don't know" as a result of not knowing the answer. An LLM never "doesn't know" the answer. But they'll gladly answer "I don't know" if that's statistically the most likely response, right? (Although current public offerings are probably trained against ever saying that.)

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#122
post #86
post #30

This reminds me of how GPT-2/3/J came across https://reddit.com/r/counting , wherein redditors repeatedly post incremental numbers to count to infinity. It considered their usernames, like SolidGoldMagikarp, such common strings on the Internet that, during tokenization, it treated them as top-level tokens of their own. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solid... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAx…

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful. In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence…

A lot of LLM hallucination is because of the internal conflict between alignment for helpfulness and lack of a clear answer. It's much like when someone gets out of their depth in a conversation and dissembles their way through to try and maintain their illusion of competence. In these cases, if you give the LLM explicit permission to tell you that it doesn't know in cases where it's not sure, that will significantly reduce hallucinations.

A lot more of LLM hallucination is it getting the context confused. I was able to get GPT4 to hallucinate easily with questions related to the distance from one planet to another, since most distances on the internet are from the sun to individual planets, and the distances between planets varies significantly based on their locations in cycle. These are probably slightly harder to fix.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#123

Isn’t the legality of web scraping still..disputed? There’s been a few projects I’ve wanted to work on involving scraping, but the idea that the entire thing could be shut down with legal threats seems to make some of the ideas infeasible. It’s strange that OpenAI has created a ~$80B company (or whatever it is) using data gathered via scraping and as far as I’m aware there haven’t been any legal threats. Was there so…

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that scraping publicly accessible content on the internet is legal.

If you publish something on a publicly served internet page, you're essentially broadcasting it to the world. You're putting something on a server which specifically communicates the bits and bytes of your media to the person requesting it without question.

You have every right to put whatever sort of barrier you'd like on the server, such as a sign in, a captcha, a puzzle, a cryptographic software key exchange mechanism, and so on. You could limit the access rights to people named Sam, requiring them to visit a particular real world address to provide notarized documentation confirming their identity in exchange for a unique 2fa fob and credentials for secure access (call it The Sams Club, maybe?)

If you don't put up a barrier, and you configure the server to deliver the content without restriction, or put your content on a server configured as such, then you are implicitly authorizing access to your content.

Little popups saying "by visiting this site, you agree to blah blah blah" are not valid. Courts made the analogy to a "gate-up/gate-down" mechanism. If you have a gate down, you can dictate the terms of engagement with your server and content. If you don't have a gate down, you're giving your content to whoever requests it.

You have control over the information you put online. You can choose which services and servers you upload to and interact with. Site operators and content producers can't decide that their intent or consent be withdrawn after the fact, as once something is published and served, the only restrictions on the scraper are how they use the information in turn.

Someone who's archived or scraped publicly served data can do whatever they want with the content within established legal boundaries. They can rewrite all the AP news articles with their own name as author, insert their name as the hero in all fanfic stories they download, and swap out every third word for "bubblegum" if they want. They just can't publish or serve that content, in turn, unless it meets the legal standards for fair use. Other exceptions to copyright apply, in educational, archival, performance, accessibility, and certain legal conditions such as First Sale doctrine. Personal use of such media is effectively unlimited.

The legality of web scraping is not disputed in the US. Other countries have some silly ideas about post-hoc "well that's not what I meant" legal mumbo jumbo designed to assist politicians and rich people in whitewashing their reputations and pulling information offline using legal threats.

Aside from right to be forgotten inanity, content on the internet falls under the same copyright rules as books, magazines, or movies published on physical media. If Disney set up a stall at San Francisco city hall with copies of the Avengers movies on a thumb drive in a giant box saying "free, take one!", this would be roughly the same as publishing those movie files to a public Disney web page. The gate would be up. (The way they have it set up in real life, with their streaming services and licensed media access, the gate is down.)

So - leaving behind the legality of redistribution of content, there's no restriction on web scraping public content, because the content was served intentionally to the software or entity that visited the site. It's up to the server operator to put barriers in place and to make content private. It's not rocket surgery, but platforms want to have their cake and eat it too, with control over publicly accessible content that isn't legal or practical.

Twitter/X is a good example of impractical control, since the site has effectively become useless spam without signing in. Platforms have to play by the same rules as everyone else. If the gate is up, the content is fair game for scraping. The Supreme Court gave the decision to a lower court, who affirmed the gate up/gate down test for legality of access to content.

Since Google and other major corporations have a vested interest in the internet remaining open and free, and their search engines and other tech are completely dependent on the gate up/gate down status quo, it's unlikely that the law will change any time soon.

Tl;dr: Anything publicly served is legal to scrape. Microsoft attempted to sue someone for scraping LinkedIn, but the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of access. If Microsoft's lawyers and money can't impede scraping, it's likely nobody will ever mount an effective challenge, and the gating doctrine is effectively the law of the land.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we just figure out a DoS attack for AGI training? How large can a robots.txt file be?

No, because there’s no legal weight behind robots.txt. The second someone weaponizes robots.txt all the scrapers will just start ignoring it.

That’s how you weaponize it. Set things up to give endless/randomized/poisoned data to anybody that ignores robots.txt.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#125
post #116

If they don't respect robots.txt then block them using a firewall or other server config. All of these companies are parasites.

I don't think this message is about "protecting the site's data" quite so much as "hey guys, you're wasting a ton of time and network connect to make your model worse. Might wanna do something 'bout that"

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#126
post #15

I’d let them do their thing, why not?! They want the internet? This is the real internet. It looks like he doesn’t really care that much that they’re retrieving millions of pages, so let them do their thing…

[flagged]

didn't click through to the site, didja?

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#127
post #65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to respect it as the majority of the requests are for the robots.txt.

He says 3 million, and 1.8 million are for robots.txt So 1.2 million non robots.txt requests, when his robots.txt file is configured as follows # buzz off User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / Theoretically if they were actually respecting robots.txt they wouldn't crawl any pages on the site. Which would also mean they wouldn't be following any links... aka not finding the N subdomains.

His site has a subdomain for every page, and the crawler is considering those each to be unique sites.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#129

If they follow robots.txt, OpenAI also has a bot blocking + data gathering problem too: https://x.com/AznWeng/status/1777688628308681000 11% of the top 100K websites already block their crawler, more than all their competitors (Google, FB, Anthropic, Perplexity) combined

It's not just a problem for training, but the end user, too. There are so many times that I've tried to ask a question or request a summary for a long article only to be told it can't read it itself, so you have to copy-paste the text into the chat. Given the non-binding nature of robots.txt and the way they seem comfortable with vacuuming up public data in other contexts, I'm surprised they allow it to be such an obstacle for the user experience.

Re: Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

#130
post #116

If they don't respect robots.txt then block them using a firewall or other server config. All of these companies are parasites.

I don't think this message is about "protecting the site's data" quite so much as "hey guys, you're wasting a ton of time and network connect to make your model worse. Might wanna do something 'bout that"

I suppose in that case, let them keep wasting their time.
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