Imagine how much power is wasted on this unfortunate necessity.
Now imagine how much power will be wasted circumventing it.
Fucking clown world we live in
On on hand, yes. On the other…imagine frustration of management of companies making and selling AI services. This is such a sweet thing to imagine.
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I…uh…frick.
I just want to keep using uncensored AI that answers my questions. Why is this a good thing?
Because it only harms bots that ignore the “no crawl” directive, so your AI remains uncensored.
Good I ignore that too. I want a world where information is shared. I can get behind the
Get behind the what?
Perhaps an AI crawler crashed Melvin’s machine halfway through the reply, denying that information to everyone else!
That’s not what the
no followcommand meansdon’t worry, information is still shared. but with people. not with capitalist pigs
Capitalist pigs are paying media to generate AI hatred to help them convince you people to get behind laws that all limit info sharing under the guise of IP and copyright
Because it’s not AI, it’s LLMs, and all LLMs do is guess what word most likely comes next in a sentence. That’s why they are terrible at answering questions and do things like suggest adding glue to the cheese on your pizza because somewhere in the training data some idiot said that.
The training data for LLMs come from the internet, and the internet is full of idiots.
LLM is a subset of AI
That’s what I do too with less accuracy and knowledge. I don’t get why I have to hate this. Feels like a bunch of cavemen telling me to hate fire because it might burn the food
Because we have better methods that are easier, cheaper, and less damaging to the environment. They are solving nothing and wasting a fuckton of resources to do so.
It’s like telling cavemen they don’t need fire because you can mount an expedition to the nearest valcanoe to cook food without the need for fuel then bring it back to them.
The best case scenario is the LLM tells you information that is already available on the internet, but 50% of the time it just makes shit up.
Wasteful?
Energy production is an issue. Using that energy isn’t. LLMs are a better use of energy than most of the useless shit we produce everyday.
Did the LLMs tell you that? It’s not hard to look up on your own:
Data centers, in particular, are responsible for an estimated 2% of electricity use in the U.S., consuming up to 50 times more energy than an average commercial building, and that number is only trending up as increasingly popular large language models (LLMs) become connected to data centers and eat up huge amounts of data. Based on current datacenter investment trends,LLMs could emit the equivalent of five billion U.S. cross-country flights in one year.
Far more than straightforward search engines that have the exact same information and don’t make shit up half the time.
From the article it seems like they don’t generate a new labyrinth for every single time: Rather than creating this content on-demand (which could impact performance), we implemented a pre-generation pipeline that sanitizes the content to prevent any XSS vulnerabilities, and stores it in R2 for faster retrieval."
I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”
Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?
Because you are coming from the perspective of a reasonable person
These people are billionaires who expect to get everything for free. Rules are for the plebs, just take it already
That’s what they are saying though. These shouldn’t be thought of as “rules”, they are suggestions near universally designed to point you to the most relevant content. Ignoring them isn’t “stealing something not meant to be captured”, it’s wasting time and resources of your own infra on something very likely to be useless to you.
Because it takes work to obey the rules, and you get less data for it. The theoretical competitor could get more ignoring those and get some vague advantage for it.
I’d not be surprised if the crawlers they used were bare-basic utilities set up to just grab everything without worrying about rules and the like.
They want everything, does it exist, but it’s not in their dataset? Then they want it.
They want their ai to answer any question you could possibly ask it. Filtering out what is and isn’t useful doesn’t achieve that
Surprised at the level of negativity here. Having had my sites repeatedly DDOSed offline by Claudebot and others scraping the same damned thing over and over again, thousands of times a second, I welcome any measures to help.
I think the negativity is around the unfortunate fact that solutions like this shouldn’t be necessary.
thousands of times a second
Modify your Nginx (or whatever web server you use) config to rate limit requests to dynamic pages, and cache them. For Nginx, you’d use either fastcgi_cache or proxy_cache depending on how the site is configured. Even if the pages change a lot, a cache with a short TTL (say 1 minute) can still help reduce load quite a bit while not letting them get too outdated.
Static content (and cached content) shouldn’t cause issues even if requested thousands of times per second. Following best practices like pre-compressing content using gzip, Brotli, and zstd helps a lot, too :)
Of course, this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones. Those are often much larger and need different protection - often some protection on the network or load balancer before it even hits the server.
Already done, along with a bunch of other stuff including cloudflare WAF and rate limiting rules.
I am still annoyed that it took me over a day’ of my life to finally (so far) restrict these things. And several other days to offload the problem to Cloudflare pages for sites that I previous self hosted but my rural link couldn’t support.
this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones.
And I don’t think these high volume AI scrapes are unintentional DDOS attacks. I consider them entirely intentional. Not deliberrately malicious, but negligent to the point of criminality. (Especially in requesting the same pages again so frequently, and all of them ignoring robots.txt)
Burning 29 acres of rainforest a day to do nothing
Bitcoin?
It certainly sounds like they generate the fake content once and serve it from cache every time: “Rather than creating this content on-demand (which could impact performance), we implemented a pre-generation pipeline that sanitizes the content to prevent any XSS vulnerabilities, and stores it in R2 for faster retrieval.”
Yeah but you also add in the energy consumption of the data scrappers
So the web is a corporate war zone now and you can choose feudal protection or being attacked from all sides. What a time to be alive.
There is also the corpo verified id route. In order to avoid the onslaught of AI bots and all that comes with them you’ll need to sacrifice freedom, anonymity, and privacy like a good little peasant to prove you aren’t a bot… and so will everyone else. You’ll likely be forced to deal with whatever AI bots are forced upon you while within the walls but better an enemy you know I guess?
Not exactly how I expected the AI wars to go, but I guess since we’re in a cyberpunk world, we take what we get
Next step is an AI that detects AI labyrinth.
It gets trained on labyrinths generated by another AI.
So you have an AI generating labyrinths to train an AI to detect labyrinths which are generated by another AI so that your original AI crawler doesn’t get lost.
It’s gonna be AI all the way down.
All the while each AI costs more power than a million human beings to run, and the world burns down around us.
The same way they justify cutting benefits for the disabled to balance budgets instead of putting taxes on the rich or just not giving them bailouts, they will justify cutting power to you before a data centre that’s 10 corporate AIs all fighting each other, unless we as a people stand up and actually demand change.
In Texas 80% of our water usage is corporate. But when the lakes are low during a drought they tell homeowners to reduce water the grass. Nobody tells the corporations to throw away less water.
AI will be allowed to use as much energy as it wants. It will even remind people to turn off the lights in a room not being occupied while wasting energy to monitor everyone’s power usage.
Vote Blue No Matter Who
Any Democrat is Better than Any Republican
In my country blue is conservatives… But I agree with the sentiment! It worked for California, it can work for your whole country, let the Dems stop fearing they’ll lose elections, give them comfortable margins and then massively support progressives who can bring in the good stuff, they won’t have a chance if the party core thinks the very future of elections is on the line, but if they think they’ll likely win anyway, you might just be able to push through a progressive candidate and end the Neoliberal decay.
To be fair, California is kind of dysfunctional and constantly trips over its own regulations when trying to get anything built. For instance, needing excessive environmental impact review for things like trains that will obviously help the environment, or limiting ferry boats crossing the bay to protect the environment even though it likely results in more people driving instead.
You need a strong and agile state. This dysfunction often stems from complexities introduced by corporate interests during the legislative process.
It’s so rare to get positive reinforcement like this, these days. Thank you.
Plenty of Democrats are voting to put trump nominees in office, plenty are voting on partisan spending bills. The CR vote should tip you off that any democrat is not better than any republican… half of them are complicit too. 10 Senate Dems just financed this authoritarian takeover.
Not a single Democrat voted to confirm Hegseth and 3 Republicans also didnt but he still got confirmed.
Every single Democrat was present and voted no for the Budget which passed the House and it still passed.
Even if 10 dems voted not to shutdown government and enter congressional recess, the CR only exists because Republicans wrote it and won’t compromise.
Any Democrat is Better than Any Republican.
Scheumer rubberstamped autocracy by not filibustering the CR. I think anyone who protects the constitution and their constituents is better than someone who doesn’t. Not that any repuclicans fit the bill, but its not like we can just trust any old democrat. Look at Gavin Newsome sliding to the right to maintain power. That the kinda dems we want?
This is why we need a centrists political party. Solutions shouldn’t be a false dichotomy.
And we shouldn’t downvote people into oblivion. Take my charitable upvote.
That will require reform of campaign finance laws and progressive reform for elections, both of which are highly partisan issues.
I bet there are corporations that want regulatory stability over political football. If someone could figure out how to tap that with Super PACs they could capture funding. Probably easier to do in local elections where on party or another has failed to put up a candidate for a judge.
I see one party races in Texas for justice of the peace and for judges. The Dems have no viable candidates in some jurisdictions because no one wants a democrat or to be labeled as one. But maybe a centrist could brand themselves as the anti democratic alternative to republicans.
No
Then you will get Republicans
Blue no matter who is precisely how we got Trump.
This is the great filter.
Why isn’t there detectable life out there? They all do the same thing we’re doing. Undone by greed.
I haven’t heard of someone refer to the great filter of intelligent life for a while. Good post.
LLMs tend to be really bad at detecting AI generated content. I can’t imagine specialized models are much better. For the crawler, it’s also exponentially more expensive and more human work, and must be replicated for every crawler since they’re so freaking secretive.
I think the hosts win here.
Yeah that’s how we achieve singularity.
I guess this is what the first iteration of the Blackwall looks like.
Gotta say “AI Labyrinth” sounds almost as cool.
I’m imagining a sci-fi spin on this where AI generators are used to keep AI crawlers in a loop, and they accidentally end up creating some unique AI culture or relationship in the process.
“I used the AI to destroy the AI”
And consumed the power output of a medium country to do it.
Yeah, great job! 👍
We truly are getting dumber as a species. We’re facing climate change but running some of the most power hungry processers in the world to spit out cooking recipes and homework answers for millions of people. All to better collect their data to sell products to them that will distract them from the climate disaster our corporations have caused. It’s really fun to watch if it wasn’t so sad.
We had to kill the internet, to save the internet.
We have to kill the Internet, to save humanity.
So the world is now wasting energy and resources to generate AI content in order to combat AI crawlers, by making them waste more energy and resources. Great! 👍
The energy cost of inference is overstated. Small models, or “sparse” models like Deepseek are not expensive to run. Training is a one-time cost that still pales in comparison to, like, making aluminum.
Doubly so once inference goes more on-device.
Basically, only Altman and his tech bro acolytes want AI to be cost prohibitive so he can have a monopoly. Also, he’s full of shit, and everyone in the industry knows it.
AI as it’s implemented has plenty of enshittification, but the energy cost is kinda a red herring.
This is getting ridiculous. Can someone please ban AI? Or at least regulate it somehow?
The problem is, how? I can set it up on my own computer using open source models and some of my own code. It’s really rough to regulate that.
As for everything, it has good things, and bad things. We need to be careful and use it in a proper way, and the same thing applies to the ones creating this technology
Once a technology or even an idea is there, you can’t really make it go away - ai is here to stay. The generative LLM are just a small part.
Generating content with AI to throw off crawlers. I dread to think of the resources we’re wasting on this utter insanity now, but hey who the fuck cares as long as the line keeps going up for these leeches.
And soon, the already AI-flooded net will be filled with so much nonsense that it becomes impossible for anyone to get some real work done. Sigh.
Some of us are only here to crank hog.
AROOO!
Should have called it “Black ICE”.
Definitely falls under the category of a Trap ICE card.
Considering how many false positives Cloudflare serves I see nothing but misery coming from this.
In terms of Lemmy instances, if your instance is behind cloudflare and you turn on AI protection, federation breaks. So their tools are not very helpful for fighting the AI scraping.
Can’t you configure exceptions for behaviours?
I’m not sure what can be done at the free tier. There is a switch to turn on AI not blocking, and it breaks federation.
You can’t whitelist domains because federation could come from and domain. Maybe you could somehow whitelist /inbox for the ActivityPub communication, but I’m not sure how to do that in Cloudflare.
Lol I work in healthcare and Cloudflare regularly blocks incoming electronic orders because the clinical notes “resemble” SQL injection. Nurses type all sorts of random stuff in their notes so there’s no managing that. Drives me insane!
