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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

#361

Post by bashfulpup »

keyringlight wrote: post #245
djha-skin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually envision Liapunov stability, like wolf and rabbit populations. In this scenario, we're the rabbits. Human content will increase when AI populations decrease, this providing more food for AI, which will then increase. This drowns out human expression, and the humans will grow quieter. This provides less fodder for the AI, and they decrease. This means less noise and the humans grow louder. The cycle repeats…

I've thought along similar lines for art, what ecological niches are there where AI can't participate, are harder to pull training data from or not economical, where humans can flourish.

Anything we humans deem private in nature from other humans.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#362

Post by Beijinger »

greenavocado wrote: post #126
maaaaattttt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.

Money is a proxy for control. Eventually humans will become mostly redundant and slated for elimination except for the chosenites of the managerial classes and a small number of technicians. Either through biological agents, famines, carefully engineered (civil?) wars and conflicts designed to only exterminate the non-managerial classes, or engineered Calhounian behavioral sinks to tank fertility rates below replacem…

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/exterminations-a-review

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#363

Post by ferguess_k »

diggan wrote: post #231
ferguess_k wrote: post #219

I dare to say the inconceivable, you shouldn't have free plans even for the community. This will also push FOSS projects to seek some money to pay for their infrastructures which probably leads to better pay for their maintainers. Nothing should be $$ free unless you already paid with your tax. Same principle -> As long as HN starts to charge every account, I'm happy to pay a small amount per month. This token amount…

Are you saying that Gnome shouldn't offer access to their VCS for free, and all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it? FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.

OK I'm dumb.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#364

Post by madeforhnyo »

ferguess_k wrote: post #181
gnz11 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP’s linked blog post mentioned they got hit with a large spike in bandwidth charges. Sending them garbage information costs money.

Yeah you have a point, hmmm, wish there were a way to somehow generate those garbages with minimum bandwidth. Something like, I can send you a very compressed 256 bytes of data which expands to something like 1 mega bytes.

Good ol' zip bomb

https://furry.engineer/@niko/113728467796605323

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#365

Post by xena »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #358
xena wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does the PoW make money via crypto mining? Or is it just to waste the caller's CPU cycles? If you could monetize the PoW then you could re-challenge at an interval tuned so that the caller pays for their usage.

It's to waste CPU cycles. I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole. I realize I'm leaving money on the table by doing this, but I don't want to alienate the kinds of communities I want to protect.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#366

Post by TonyTrapp »

ebiester wrote: post #44
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #5

...at some point, some people started appreciating mailing lists and the distributed nature of Git again.

Yes and no. The distributed nature of git is fine until you want to serve it to the world - then, you're back to bad actors. They're looking for commits because it's nicely chunked, I'm taking a guess.

> They're looking for commits because it's nicely chunked, I'm taking a guess.

They're not looking for anything specifically from what I can tell. If that was the case, they would be just cloning the git repository, as it would be the easiest way to ingest such information. Instead, they just want to guzzle every single URL they can get hold of. And a web frontend for git generates thousands of those. Every file in a repository results in dozens, if not hundreds of unique links for file revisions, blame, etc. and many of those are expensive to serve. Which is why they are often put in robots.txt, so everything was fine until the LLM crawlers came along and ignored robots.txt.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#367

Post by eadmund »

rectang wrote: post #356
eadmund wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. When I read someone else’s essay I may intend to write essays like that author. When I read someone else’s code I may intend to write code like that author. AI training is no different from any other training. > If a court determines that the AI output you've used is close enough to be considered a de…

If you as an individual recognizably regurgitate the essay you read, then you have infringed. If an AI model recongnizably regurgitates the essay it trained on then it has infringed. The AI argument that passing original content through an algorithm insulates the output from claims of infringement because of "fair use" is pigwash.

> If an AI model recongnizably regurgitates the essay it trained on then it has infringed.

I completely agree — that’s why I explicitly wrote ‘non-copy paintings’ in my example.

> The AI argument that passing original content through an algorithm insulates the output from claims of infringement because of "fair use" is pigwash.

Sure, but the argument that training an AI on content is necessarily infringement is equally pigwash. So long as the resulting model does not contain copies, it is not infringement; and so long as it does not produce a copy, it is not infringement.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#368

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

sir-alien wrote: post #103
lelanthran wrote: post #42

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

You can have a whitelist for allowed users and ban everyone else by default, which I think is where this will eventually take us.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#369

Post by diggan »

ferguess_k wrote: post #363
diggan wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that Gnome shouldn't offer access to their VCS for free, and all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it? FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.

OK I'm dumb.

No, just overly capitalistic, but that's probably more because of your environment than anything, and very possible to change if you want :)

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#370

Post by usefulcat »

totetsu wrote: post #2

Could one put a mangler on the responses to suspected bots to poison their data sets with nonsense code.. :/

If you could conclusively identify bots, you could not serve them anything and save yourself some work (and bandwidth).

If you can't conclusively identify bots, you'll end up serving 'poisoned' responses to actual users. Doesn't seem like a viable solution.

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