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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#161
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which organizations are willing to take on that burden (time, expenses, stress, etc.) for free, with no guarantee that they will win? There is not really any incentive or reward for 3rd-party organizations to step in and do this.

That's what GNU was originally for, and why they requested copyright assignment from contributors to their projects.

[deleted]

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#162
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Careful, I think you're being sarcastic, but you're in a space where a lot of people believe what you just said unironically.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#163

I know a lot of FOSS people are hostile to AI in general, and this is an immediate problem, but I feel like a better solution for everyone would be for there to be some sort of central repo of this information that AI companies can pull from without externalizing their costs like this.

> hostile to AI in general

What?! "AI"?!?! We are talking about traffic abusers!...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#164
post #56

> According to Drew, LLM crawlers don't respect robots.txt requirements and include expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository. They do so using random User-Agents from tens of thousands of IP addresses, each one making no more than one HTTP request, trying to blend in with user traffic. How do they know that these are LLM crawlers and not anything else?

That was my reaction. It seems like the article is saying two mutually exclusive things: - We cannot block them because we can’t differentiate legitimate traffic from illegitimate traffic… - …but we can conclusively identify this traffic as coming from AI crawlers.

It's a situation where it's difficult to tell for individual requests at request handling time, but easy to see when you look at the total request volume.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#165
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't really work if crawlers are coming from the IP ranges of AWS and Azure etc...

Or sometimes they use consumer IP proxies. Makes it even harder because sometimes those IPs get reused for actual users.

Block them for 24 hours.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#166

The 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…

Can we not just have a whitelist for allowed crawlers and ban the rest by default? Then places like DuckDuckGo and Google can provide a list of IP addresses that their crawlers will come from. Then simply just don't include major LLM providers like OpenAI

How are the crawlers identifying themselves? If it's user agent strings then they can be faked. If it's cryptographically secured then you create a situation where newcomers can't get into the market.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#167
post #142

Insane, I wonder if we eventually end up with a non-search-engine indexed version of the web that's more like browsing in the 90s where websites just had to link to oneanother to get noticed . . . . I love that the solution to LLM scraping is to serve the browser a proof of work, before they allow access - I wonder if things like new sites start to do this . . . It would mean they won't be indexed by search engines,…

Hi! I do this! See https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis for more info!

thank you for your contribution to society!

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#168
post #142

Insane, I wonder if we eventually end up with a non-search-engine indexed version of the web that's more like browsing in the 90s where websites just had to link to oneanother to get noticed . . . . I love that the solution to LLM scraping is to serve the browser a proof of work, before they allow access - I wonder if things like new sites start to do this . . . It would mean they won't be indexed by search engines,…

Hi! I do this! See https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis for more info!

I hope lots of websites adopt this, mainly because I want to see more happy jackal girls while browsing.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#169
Outside of disruptive measures like requiring accounts, captchas, or payment, one possible solution would be to use AI against itself by training machine learning models to monitor, flag, and issue challenges to web requests exhibiting "bot-like" behavior. This way, not all web traffic would be disrupted with challenges until the machine learning models have reason to believe the traffic is coming from a bot.
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