Could one put a mangler on the responses to suspected bots to poison their data sets with nonsense code.. :/
Cloudflare is offering something like this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I've been doing! It works shockingly well. https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
these companies have more compute than everyone else in the world put together a proof of work function will end up selecting FOR them!
Use judo techniques. Use their own computing power against them with fake links to fake Markov generated bullshit at random, until their cache get poisoned with no turning point as it's impossible; the LLM's begin to either forget their own stuff or hallucinate once their input it's basically feeded from other LLM's (or themselves).
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#93Isn't this just poor, sloppy crawler implementation? You shouldn't need to fetch a repo more than once to add it to a training set.
You are correct it's poor and sloppy, but it's not "just" that. It's a lack of concern over the effects of their poor/sloppy crawler implementation. The poor implementation is not really relevant, it's companies deciding they own the internet and can take whatever they want, let everyone else deal with the consequences. The companies do not care what the impact of their ai non-sense is..
A capitalist externalizing costs?! Why, no, never! /s
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#94We need a project in the spirit of Spamhaus to actively maintain a list of perpetrating IPs. If they're cycling through IPs and IP blocks I don't know how sustainable a CAPTCHA-like solution is.
Just block all of AWS, Alibaba, GCP and Azure, or throttle them aggressively. If you have clients/customers that need more requests per second then have them provide you with their IPs.
The problem is that these companies are fairly well funded and renting infrastructure isn't an issue.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#95Banning these crawlers is not the answer. Poisoning the well is.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#96The big takeaway here is that Google's (and advertisement in general) dominance over the web is going away. This is because the only way to stop the bots is with a captcha, and this also stops search indexers from indexing your site. This will result in search engines not indexing sites, and hence providing no value anymore. There's probably going to be a small lag as the current knowledge in the current LLMs dry up…
IMO this was one of the real motives for Web Environment Integrity. Allow Google to index but nobody else.
We're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Which do you prefer, entrenched incumbents or affordable/open hosting?
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#97The big takeaway here is that Google's (and advertisement in general) dominance over the web is going away. This is because the only way to stop the bots is with a captcha, and this also stops search indexers from indexing your site. This will result in search engines not indexing sites, and hence providing no value anymore. There's probably going to be a small lag as the current knowledge in the current LLMs dry up…
It will entrench established search engines even more if they have to move to auth-based crawling, so that the only crawlers will be those you invite. Most people will do this for google, bing, and maybe one or two others if there is a simple tool to do so.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#98So I'll just float an idea again that always gets rejected here. This is yet another problem that could be solved completely by... Eliminating anonymity by default on the internet. To be clear, you could still have anonymous spaces like Reddit where arbitrary user IDs are used and real identities are discarded. People could opt-in to those spaces. But for most people most of the time, things get better when you can v…
>Yes there are downsides to this idea but I'd like people to have real conversations around those rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.
It's hard to have a serious conversation when you present a couple of upsides but completely understate/not mention the downsides.
Eliminating anonymity comes with real danger. What about whistleblowers and marginalized groups? The increased likelihood of targeted harassment, stalking, and chilling effects on free speech? The increase in surveillance? The reduction in content creation and legitimate criticism of companies/products/etc? The power imbalance granted to whoever validates identities?
pjc50 brings up some other great points, which got me thinking even more:
Removing anonymity creates a greater incentive to steal identities, has a slew of logistical issues (who/how are IDs verified, what IDs are accepted, what are the enforcement mechanisms and who enforces them, etc.), creates issues with shared accounts and corporate/brand accounts, would require cooperation across every country with internet access (good luck!) otherwise it doesn't really work, and probably a million other things if I keep thinking about it.
Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#99Does anyone maintain a list of ai products developed without scraping?
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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just burning their goodwill to the ground AI firms seem to be leading from a position that goodwill is irrelevant: a $100bn pile of capital, like an 800lb gorilla, does what it wants. AI will be incorporated into all products whether you like it or not; it will absorb all data whether you like it or not.
Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…
And how could they possibly base their actions on good when their technology is more important than fire? History is depending on them to do everything possible to increase their market cap.