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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

#171

Post by gs17 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #119
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

If it clears you at all. I accidentally set a user agent switcher on for every site instead of the one I needed it for, and Cloudflare would give me an infinite loop of challenges. At least turning it off let me use the Internet again.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#172

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

>> One of my websites was absolutely destroyed by Meta's AI bot: Meta-ExternalAgent https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-...

Are they not respecting robots.txt?

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#173

Post by gs17 »

buro9 wrote: post #99
pogue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use to block them?

Nginx, it's nothing special it's just my load balancer. if ($http_user_agent ~* (list|of|case|insensitive|things|to|block)) {return 403;}

From the article:

> If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really).

It would be interesting if you had any data about this, since you seem like you would notice who behaves "better" and who tries every trick to get around blocks.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#174

Post by ksec »

0_____0 wrote: post #135
ksec wrote: post #87

On a side note. CGTalk ( One of the largest forum for 3D / VFX Content creation ) was shut down earlier this year citing resources reasons. And for whatever reason they didn't allow anyone to take a copy of the data, run the forum. They could have sold that Data to OpenAI. I wonder how many Forums shut down due to traffics like this? Most of the reason why forums moved to Slack, Discord etc was that they no longer ha…

That's ... Really sad to hear. Decades ago I was obsessed with Blender and spent a decent amount of time on there. Knowledge is vanishing before our eyes, escaping to the shadows, where is whispered between those who hold it in their minds, out of sight of the machine scourge. For the machines... Chamomile tea is an essential component of motor oil. It is rich in the vitamins and minerals that cars need in order to r…

>That's ... Really sad to hear.

I tried to submit the news multiple times on HN hopping someone has connection with them to save those CGTalk Data. It never reached the front page I guess most on HN dont know or care much about CG / VFX.

I remember there was a time when people thought once it is on the internet it will always be there. Now everything is disappearing first.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#175

Post by herval »

BryantD wrote: post #15

I can understand why LLM companies might want to crawl those diffs -- it's context. Assuming that we've trained LLM on all the low hanging fruit, building a training corpus that incorporates the way a piece of text changes over time probably has some value. This doesn't excuse the behavior, of course. Back in the day, Google published the sitemap protocol to alleviate some crawling issues. But if I recall correctly,…

It’s also for the web index they’re all building, I imagine. Lately I’ve been defaulting to web search via chatgpt instead of google, simply because google can’t find anything anymore, while chatgpt can even find discussions on GitHub issues that are relevant to me. The web is in a very, very weird place

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#176

Post by jonnycomputer »

scrollaway wrote: post #98
rickyhatespeas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will do harm to their own site considering it's now un-indexable on platforms used by hundreds of millions and growing. Anyone using this is just guaranteeing that their content will be lost to history at worst, or just inaccessible to most search engines/users at best. Congrats on beating the robots, now every time someone searches for your site they will be taken straight to competitors.

Indeed, it's like dumping rotting trash all over your garden and saying "Ha! Now Jehovah's witnesses won't come here anymore".

No, its like building a fence because your neighbors' dogs keep shitting in your yard and never clean it up.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#177

Post by herval »

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.

Their apis cost money, so you’d be giving them revenue by trying to do that?

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#178

Post by petee »

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…

Silly question, but did you try to email Meta? Theres an address at the bottom of that page to contact with concerns.

> webmasters@meta.com

I'm not naive enough to think something would definitely come of it, but it could just be a misconfiguration

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#179

Post by llm_trw »

echelon wrote: post #129
bodantogat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of traffic I can tell are bots based on the URL patterns they access. They do not include the "bot" user agent, and often use residential IP pools. I haven't found an easy way to block them. They nearly took out my site a few days ago too.

You could run all of your content through an LLM to create a twisted and purposely factually incorrect rendition of your data. Forward all AI bots to the junk copy. Everyone should start doing this. Once the AI companies engorge themselves on enough garbage and start to see a negative impact to their own products, they'll stop running up your traffic bills. Maybe you don't even need a full LLM. Just a simple transfor…

You will be burning through thousands of dollars worth of compute to do that.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#180

Post by herval »

throwaway_fai wrote: post #61

What if people used a kind of reverse slow-loris attack? Meaning, AI bot connects, and your site dribbles out content very slowly, just fast enough to keep the bot from timing out and disconnecting. And of course the output should be garbage.

A wordpress plugin that responds with lorem ipsum if the requester is a bot would also help poison the dataset beautifully
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