Anubis: Proof-of-work proxy to prevent AI crawlers

Is there a way to alter text to poison AI training sets? I know there's Glaze and Nightshade for images but I've heard of nothing to poison text models. To be clear, this wouldn't be a defensive measure to stop scraping; it'd be an offensive honeypot: you'd want to make pages that have the same text but mutated slightly differently each time, so that AI scrapers preferentially load up on your statistically different text and then yield a poisoned model. Ideally the scraper companies will realize what's going on and stop scraping.

Regarding the problem of how to let "good" bots through:

You could use PKI: Drop the PoW if the client provides a TLS client certificate chain that asserts that corresponds to a private key that is controlled by (or just by, say, , for Let's Encrypt-style automatable cert signing). This would be a slight hassle for good bot operators to set up, but not a very big deal. The result is that bad bots couldn't spoof good bots to get in.

(Obviously this strategy generalises to handling human users too -- but in that case, the loss of privacy, as well as admin inconvenience, makes it much less palatable.)

yeah not very different from https://gitgud.io/fatchan/haproxy-protection/ or other pow walls you see on onion sites

AFAICT this isn't possible, unless you're OK with showing everyone the poisoned text.

TTBOMK there's nothing here that "detects botness" of an individual request, because in the limit, that's impossible -- if an attacker has access to many different IPs to make requests from (and many do), then any sequence of bot-generated requests from different IPs is indistinguishable from the same set of requests made by actual living, breathing humans (and vice versa).

So how does Anubis work against bots if it can't actually detect them? Because of the economics behind them: To justify creating a bot in the first place, you need to scrape a lot of pages, so paying a small electricity cost per page means you will need to pay a lot overall. Humans pay this too, but because we request a much smaller number of pages, the overall cost is negligibly low.