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AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

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Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#111

Post by gameman144 »

acedTrex wrote: post #76
azemetre wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a fine line between scrapping and DDOS’ing I’m sure. Just because you manufacture chemicals doesn’t mean you can legally dump your toxic waste anywhere you want (well shouldn’t be allowed to at least). You also shouldn’t be able to set your crawlers causing sites to fail.

intent is likely very important to something like a ddos charge

Maybe, but impact can also make a pretty viable case.

For instance, if you own a home you may have an easement on part of your property that grants other cars from your neighborhood access to pass through it rather than going the long way around.

If Amazon were to build a warehouse on one side of the neighborhood, however, it's not obvious that they would be equally legally justified to send their whole fleet back and forth across it every day, even though their intent is certainly not to cause you any discomfort at all.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#113

Post by FrustratedMonky »

throwaway_fai wrote: post #52
coldpie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being one of the monsters who works at Facebook and thinking you're not one of the evil ones.

[flagged]

The Banality of Evil.

Everyone has to pay bills, and satisfy the boss.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#114

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

markerz wrote: post #23

One of my websites was absolutely destroyed by Meta's AI bot: Meta-ExternalAgent https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-... It seems a bit naive for some reason and doesn't do performance back-off the way I would expect from Google Bot. It just kept repeatedly requesting more and more until my server crashed, then it would back off for a minute and then request more again. My solution was to add…

> Cloudflare also has a feature to block known AI bots and even suspected AI bots

In addition to other crushing internet risks, add wrongly blacklisted as a bot to the list.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#115

Post by hombre_fatal »

I have a large forum with millions of posts that is frequently crawled and LLMs know a lot about it. It’s surprising how ChatGPT and company know about the history of the forum and pretty cool.

But I also feel like it’s a fun opportunity to be a little mischievous and try to add some text to old pages that can sway LLMs somehow. Like a unique word.

Any ideas?

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#116

Post by throwaway_fai »

jahewson wrote: post #71
CoastalCoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would work to send Meta's legal department a notice that they are not permitted to access your website. Would that make subsequent accesses be violations of the U.S.'s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

No, fortunately random hosts on the internet don’t get to write a letter and make something a crime.

Unless they're a big company in which case they can DMCA anything they want, and they get the benefit of the doubt.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#117

Post by pogue »

bloppe wrote: post #55

They're the ones serving the expensive traffic. Wut if people were to form a volunteer bot net to waste their GPU resources in a similar fashion, just sending tons of pointless queries per day like "write me a 1000 word essay that ...". Could even form a non-profit around it and call it research.

That sounds like a good way to waste enormous amounts of energy that's already being expended by legitimate LLM users.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#118

Post by walterbell »

GaggiX wrote: post #79
walterbell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With tiny amounts of forum text, obfuscation can be done locally with open models and local inference hardware (NPU on Arm SoC). Zero dollars sent to OpenAI, NVIDIA, AMD or GPU clouds.

>local inference hardware (NPU on Arm SoC). Okay the battle is already lost from the beginning.

There are alternatives to NVIDIAmaxing with brute force. See the Chinese paper on DeepSeek V3, comparable to recent GPT and Claude, trained with 90% fewer resources. Research on efficient inference continues.

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3/blob/main/DeepSee...

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#119

Post by throwaway290 »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #114
markerz wrote: post #23

One of my websites was absolutely destroyed by Meta's AI bot: Meta-ExternalAgent https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-... It seems a bit naive for some reason and doesn't do performance back-off the way I would expect from Google Bot. It just kept repeatedly requesting more and more until my server crashed, then it would back off for a minute and then request more again. My solution was to add…

> Cloudflare also has a feature to block known AI bots and even suspected AI bots In addition to other crushing internet risks, add wrongly blacklisted as a bot to the list.

What do you mean crushing risk? Just solve these 12 puzzles by moving tiny icons on tiny canvas while on the phone and you are in the clear for a couple more hours!

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#120

Post by jdndbsndn »

joshdavham wrote: post #41

I deployed a small dockerized app on GCP a couple months ago and these bots ended up costing me a ton of money for the stupidest reason: https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/issues/9673 I originally shared my app on Reddit and I believe that that’s what caused the crazy amount of bot traffic.

The linked issue talks about 1 req/s?

That seems really reasonable to me, how was this a problem for your application or caused significant cost?

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