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Feed the bots

maurycyz.com

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Re: Feed the bots

#61

Post by markus_zhang »

peterlk wrote: post #45
markus_zhang wrote: post #41

I have always recommended this strategy: flood the AI bots with garbage that looks like authentic information so that they need actual humans to filter the information. Make sure that every site does this so they get more garbage than real stuffs. Hike up the proportion so that even ordinary people eventually figure out that using these AI products has more harm than use because it just produces garbage. I just don't…

LLMs can now detect garbage much more cheaply than humans can. This might increase cost slightly for the companies that own the AIs, but it almost certainly will not result in hiring human reviewers

What about garbage that are difficult to tell from truth?

For example, say I have an AD&D website, how does AI tell whether a piece of FR history is canon or not? Yeah I know it's a bit extreme, but you get the idea.

Re: Feed the bots

#62

Post by Lord-Jobo »

righthand wrote: post #51
zkmon wrote: post #24

Really cool. Reminds me of farmers of some third world countries. Completely ignored by government, exploited by commission brokers, farmers now use all sorts of tricks, including coloring and faking their farm produce, without regard for health hazards to consumers. The city dwellers who thought they have gamed the system through high education, jobs and slick-talk, have to consume whatever is served to them by the…

The agricultural farmers did it to themselves, many are very wealthy already. Anything corporate America has taken over is because the farmers didn’t want to do the maintenance work. So they sell out to big corporations who will make it easier. Same as any other consumer using Meta products. You sell out because it’s easier to network that way. I am the son of a farmer. Edit: added disclosure at the bottom and clarif…

This is a very biased source discussing a very real prescription issue, and worth a glance for the statistics:

https://www.farmkind.giving/the-small-farm-myth-debunked

Tldr; the concept of farmers as small family farms has not been rooted in truth for a very long time in America

Re: Feed the bots

#63

Post by jcynix »

TekMol wrote: post #55

How about adding some image with a public http logger url like https://ih879.requestcatcher.com/test to each of the nonsense pages, so we can see an endless flood of funny requests at https://ih879.requestcatcher.com ? I'm not sure requestcatcher is a good one, it's just the first one that came up when I googled. But I guess there are many such services, or one could also use some link shortener service with public l…

You can easily generate a number of random images with ImageMagick and serve these as part of the babbled text. And you could even add text onto these images so image analyzers with OCR will have "fun" too.

Example code:

   for c in aqua blue green yellow ; do
      for w in hello world huba hop ; do
         magick -size 1024x768 xc:$c -gravity center -annotate 0 $w /tmp/$w-$c.jpeg
      done
   done
Do this in a loop for all colors known to the web and for a number of words from a text corpus, and voila, ... ;-)

Edit: added example

Re: Feed the bots

#64

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #14
8organicbits wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical side is straightforward but the legal implications of trying passwords to try to scrape content behind authentication could pose a barrier. Using credentials that aren't yours, even if they are publicly known, is (in many jurisdictions) a crime. Doing it at scale as part of a company would be quite risky.

> but the legal implications of trying passwords to try to scrape content behind authentication could pose a barrier If you're doing something alike to cracking then yeah. But if the credentials are right there on the landing page, and visible to the public, it's not really cracking anymore since you already know the right password before you try it, and the website that put up the basic auth is freely sharing the pa…

> freely sharing the password

It doesn't have to be so free. It can be shared with the stipulation that it's not used in a bot.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

  (a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures.—
    (1)
      (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
This has been used by car manufacturers to deny diagnostic information even though the encryption key needed to decrypt the information is sitting on disk next to the encrypted data. That's since been exempted for vehicle repairs but only because they're vehicle repairs, not because the key was left in plain view.

If you are only authorized to access it under certain conditions, trying to access it outside those conditions is illegal (in the US, minimally). Gaining knowledge of a password does not grant permission to use it.

Re: Feed the bots

#65

Post by righthand »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #62
righthand wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agricultural farmers did it to themselves, many are very wealthy already. Anything corporate America has taken over is because the farmers didn’t want to do the maintenance work. So they sell out to big corporations who will make it easier. Same as any other consumer using Meta products. You sell out because it’s easier to network that way. I am the son of a farmer. Edit: added disclosure at the bottom and clarif…

This is a very biased source discussing a very real prescription issue, and worth a glance for the statistics: https://www.farmkind.giving/the-small-farm-myth-debunked Tldr; the concept of farmers as small family farms has not been rooted in truth for a very long time in America

This is for livestock farming, I was specifically discussing agricultural farming.

In general though, the easy rule of living and eating non-mega farmed food and sustainable living is to “eat aware”:

My other advice is a one-size-fits-all food equation, which is, simply, to know where it came from. If you can't place it, trace it, or grow it/raise it/catch it yourself, don't eat it. Eat aware. Know your food. Don't wait on waiters or institutions to come up with ways to publicize it, meet your small fishmonger and chat him or her up at the farmer's market yourself. [0]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-pescatores-dilemma_b_2463...

Re: Feed the bots

#66

Post by blackhaj7 »

Can someone explain how this works?

Surely the bots are still hitting the pages they were hitting before but now they also hit the garbage pages too?

Re: Feed the bots

#67

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

peterlk wrote: post #45
markus_zhang wrote: post #41

I have always recommended this strategy: flood the AI bots with garbage that looks like authentic information so that they need actual humans to filter the information. Make sure that every site does this so they get more garbage than real stuffs. Hike up the proportion so that even ordinary people eventually figure out that using these AI products has more harm than use because it just produces garbage. I just don't…

LLMs can now detect garbage much more cheaply than humans can. This might increase cost slightly for the companies that own the AIs, but it almost certainly will not result in hiring human reviewers

> LLMs can now detect garbage much more cheaply than humans can.

Off the top of my head, I don't think this is true for training data. I could be wrong, but it seems very fallible to let GPT-5 be the source of ground truth for GPT-6.

Re: Feed the bots

#68

Post by wodenokoto »

blackhaj7 wrote: post #66

Can someone explain how this works? Surely the bots are still hitting the pages they were hitting before but now they also hit the garbage pages too?

In authors setup, sending Markova generated garbage is much lighter on resources than sending static pages. Only bots will continue to follow links to the next piece of garbage and thus he traps bots in garbage. No need to detect bots, they reveal themselves.

But yes, all bots start out on an actual page.

Re: Feed the bots

#69

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #64
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the legal implications of trying passwords to try to scrape content behind authentication could pose a barrier If you're doing something alike to cracking then yeah. But if the credentials are right there on the landing page, and visible to the public, it's not really cracking anymore since you already know the right password before you try it, and the website that put up the basic auth is freely sharing the pa…

> freely sharing the password It doesn't have to be so free. It can be shared with the stipulation that it's not used in a bot. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 (a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures.— (1) (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. This has been used by car manufacturers to deny…

Huh, that's interesting, I'm not too familiar with US law, so not surprising I didn't know that :) Time to lookup if it works similarly in my country today, last time I was involved with anything slightly related to it was almost two decades ago, and at that point we (as a company with legal consul) made choices that assumed public info was OK to use, as it was public (paraphrased from memory), but might look differently today.

Thanks for adding the additional context!

Re: Feed the bots

#70

Post by wodenokoto »

theturtlemoves wrote: post #60

Does this really work though? I know nothing about the inner workings of LLMs, but don't you want to break their word associations? Rather than generating "garbage" text based on which words tend to occur together and LLMs generating text based on which words it has seen together, don't you want to give them text that relates unrelated words?

Why? The point is not to train bots one way or another, it’s to keep them busy in low resource activities instead of high resource activities.
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