Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit

Post by grumbelbart » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #120

FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training. Unless you are Anthropic or OAI it seems like a wild stance to have. It’s good when people are rewarded for works that other people value. If trainers don’t value the work, they shouldn’t train on it. If they do, they should pay for it.

>I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training. Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".

Post by pugchat » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

Post by gruez » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

grumbelbart wrote: post #151

gruez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training. Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".

Would using an actors face and voice as training data be fair use? What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?

Post by aduwah » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

cdrini wrote: post #145

ethmarks wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, since this argument is about semantic pedantry anyways, it's just denial-of-service, not distributed denial-of-service. AI scraper requests come from centralized servers, not a botnet. Secondly, denial-of-service implies intentionality and malice that I don't think is present from AI scrapers. They cause huge problems, but only as a negligent byproduct of other goals. I think that the tragedy of the commons…

The first is incorrect, these scrapers are usually distributed across many IPs, in my experience. I usually refer to them as "disturbed, non-identifying crawlers (DNCs)" when I want to be maximally explicit. (The worst I've seen is some crawler/botnet making exactly one request per IP -_-)

Post by GeoAtreides » Sun, Mar 29, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #152

GeoAtreides wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm curious, do you honestly think the argument was about recipes and cookies? maybe it was an analogy? looking back up the comment tree, it does seem to be an analogy, not a discussion about ACTUAL cookies and ACTUAL recipes.

>maybe it was an analogy? In that case it's a terrible analogy because if you can't get people to agree on the cookies case, what hope do you have to extend it to the case you're trying to apply the analogy to? It's like saying "You wouldn't pirate a movie, why would you pirate a blog post", because most people would pirate movies.