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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

#451

Post by Suppafly »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #413
Suppafly wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. The people without a basic internet presence aren't likely to be customers anyway so it's not a huge loss. It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden, if you aren't willing to do that, you're in a tiny minority.

> It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden It's equally trivial for a restaurant to set up a custom domain with their own 2-page website (overview and menu) on any of a hundred platforms that provide this service. Most of these services are not free like FB, but any business that can afford a landline phone can afford a real website.

>It's equally trivial for a restaurant to set up a custom domain with their own 2-page website (overview and menu) on any of a hundred platforms that provide this service.

Sure but they don't want to. If you want to see the menu they have online you need to follow their rules, not your own.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#452

Post by sourtrident »

Honestly reminds me of the early email spam wars - clever attempts at blocking, endless whack-a-mole with spoofed addresses. Problem is, now it's hitting open source projects we love. Maybe the AI gold rush is accidentally strangling the very communities that made its own existence possible.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#453

Post by asveikau »

pjc50 wrote: post #10
ericholscher wrote: post #3

Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place. I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground. I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us direct…

> 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.

Rules and laws are for other people. A lot of people reading this comment having mistaken "fake it til you make it" or "better to not ask permission" for good life advice are responsible for perpetrating these attitudes, which are fundamentally narcissistic.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#454

Post by Suppafly »

inetknght wrote: post #403
Suppafly wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in a tiny enough minority that it doesn't matter to them. It's like Amish complaining that they can't use a drive-thru window or something. Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

> Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever. And those 30 seconds are a harrowing pit of despair out of which comes the rest of your life filled with advertisements, tracking, second-guessing, and accusations of being a hypocrite.

I haven't had any of that just from having an FB and IG account. I honestly forgot I had an IG account for a long time until someone shared something with me and I realized I had one.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#455

Post by lostpencil »

Eridrus wrote: post #238
lostpencil wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that everyone move their projects to a single code forge (GitHub)? Also, isn't this basically just extortion? "I know you're minding you're own business FOSS maintainer, but move your code to our recommended forge instead so we can stop DDoSing you?"

I'm mostly suggesting a mirror to some centralized location. GitHub is probably a good place to mirror to for code, but it could be elsewhere. I was actually thinking of a more general thing than just code, eg similar to CommonCrawl, but maybe a code specific thing is what is needed.

Isn't this still similar to extortion? Maintainers aren't creating the problem. They are minding their own business until scrapers come along and make too many unnecessary requests. Seems like the burden is clearly on the scrapers. They could easily be hitting the pages much less often for a start.

Doesn't your suggestion shift the responsibility to likely under-sponsored FOSS maintainers rather than companies? Also, how do people agree to switch to some centralized repository and how long does that take? Even if people move over, would that solve the issue? How would a scraper know not to crawl a maintainer's site? Scrapers already ignore robots.txt, so they'd probably still crawl even if you verified you've uploaded the latest content.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#456

Post by tremon »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #416
bitmasher9 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure that I like this plan. We shouldn’t let the illegal AIs gain more knowledge and usefulness than the legal ones. There’s other options besides a blanket ban.

As it is now, unethical AIs have a huge advantage over ethical ones.

Unethical behaviour always has a huge advantage over ethical behaviour, that's nothing new and pretty much by definition. The only way to prevent a race to the bottom is to make the unethical behaviour illegal or unprofitable.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#458

Post by mafuy »

tadfisher wrote: post #447
dbingham wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet. If it's owned by a few, as it is right now, it's an existential threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of a happiness of everyone else on the planet. We should be seriously considering what we're going to do in response to that threat if something doesn't change soon.

AI is going to implode within 2 years. Once it starts ingesting its own output as training data it is going to be at best capped at its current capability and at worst even more hallucinatory and worthless.

Nonsense. Some of the current best AI models were specifically trained on AI output.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#459

Post by rglullis »

regularfry wrote: post #435
rglullis wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have a global solution and it doesn't need to be implemented only on a specific technology-based system. I mean, at Communick I offer Matrix, Mastodon, Funkwhale and Lemmy accounts only for paying customers. As such, I have implemented payments via Stripe for convenience, but that didn't stop from getting customers who wanted to pay directly via crypto, SEPA and even cash. It also didn't stop me from bypas…

Right, so the gap I'm seeing is that anyone who wants to identity farm just does what you've done. The problem isn't the assurance that you receive, it's the assurance you give to anyone else that any of your customers are flesh-and-blood.

> it's the assurance you give to anyone else that any of your customers are flesh-and-blood.

Why would any third party rely on authentication based on the relationship between my service and my customers?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#460

Post by pratik661 »

imtringued wrote: post #175

Certificate authorities will be delighted to sell overpriced client certificates as a result of this.

My thoughts exactly.

In physical environments where people are bombarded with low-information “noise”, gatekeeping (ie credentialism) emerges as a natural mechanism.

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