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This is surely trivial to detect. If the number of pages on the site is greater than some insanely high number then just drop all data from that site from the training data.
It’s not like I can afford to compete with OpenAI on bandwidth, and they’re burning through money with no cares already.
Yeah sure, but when do you stop gathering regularly constructed data, when your goal is to grab as much as possible?
Markov chains are an amazingly simple way to generate data like this, and a little bit of stacked logic it’s going to be indistinguishable from real large data sets.
I’m so happy to see that ai poison is a thing
It’s so sad we’re burning coal and oil to generate heat and electricity for dumb shit like this.
Wait till you realize this project’s purpose IS to force AI to waste even more resources.
I mean, the long term goal would be to discourage ai companies from engaging in this behavior by making it useless
This gives me a little hope.
I mean, we contemplate communism, fascism, this, that, and another. When really, it’s just collective trauma and reactionary behavior, because of the lack of self-awareness and in the world around us. So this could just be synthesized as human stupidity. We’re killing ourselves because we’re too stupid to live.
“Markov Babble” would make a great band name
Their best album was Infinite Maze.
Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.
Better yet. Share links to tarpits with your non-friends and enemies
That would be terrible, I have friends but they mostly send uninteresting stuff.
No they wouldn’t. I’m guessing you’re not old enough to remember a time before search engines. The public web dies without crawling. Corporations will own it all you’ll never hear about anything other than amazon or Walmart dot com again.
Nope. That isn’t how it worked. You joined message boards that had lists of web links. There were still search engines, but they were pretty localized. Google was also amazing when their slogan was “don’t be evil” and they meant it.
I was there. People carried physical notepads with URLs, shared them on BBS’, or other forums. It was wild.
There was also “circle banners” of websites that would link to each others… And then off course “stumble upon”…
Yes! Web rings!
I forgot web rings! Also the crazy all centered Geocities websites people made. The internet was an amazing place before the major corporations figured it out.
There used to be 3 or 4 brands of, say, lawnmowers. Word of mouth told us what quality order them fell in. Everyone knew these things and there were only a few Ford Vs. Chevy sort of debates.
Bought a corded leaf blower at the thrift today. 3 brands I recognized, same price, had no idea what to get. And if I had had the opportunity to ask friends or even research online, I’d probably have walked away more confused. For example; One was a Craftsman. “Before, after or in-between them going to shit?”
Got off topic into real-world goods. Anyway, here’s my word-of-mouth for today: Free, online Photoshop. If I had money to blow, I’d drop the $5/mo. for the “premium” service just to encourage them. (No, you’re not missing a thing using it free.)
Bad bot, please die.
How do you know that’s a bot please? Is it specifically a hot advertising that online photos hop equivalent? Is it a real software or scam? The whole approach is intriguing to me
Edit: I Will assume honesty in this instance. It’s because they’re advertising something in a very particular tone, to match what some Amerikaanse consider common language.
Normal people don’t do that.
Deployment of Nepenthes and also Anubis (both described as “the nuclear option”) are not hate. It’s self-defense against pure selfish evil, projects are being sucked dry and some like ScummVM could only freakin’ survive thanks to these tools.
Those AI companies and data scrapers/broker companies shall perish, and whoever wrote this headline at arstechnica shall step on Lego each morning for the next 6 months.
Feels good to be on an instance with Anubis
Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!
Thanks, interesting and brief read!
Thank you!
one of the united Nations websites deployed Anubis
Wait what? I am uninformed, can you elaborate on the ScummVM thing? Or link an article?
From the Fabulous Systems (ScummVM’s sysadmin) blog post linked by Natanox:
About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server.
This went on for a couple of days without seriously impacting our server or accessibility–it was a tad slower than usual.
And then the website went down.
Now, it was time to find out what was going on. Hoping that it was just one single IP trying to annoy us, I opened the access log of the day
there were many IPs–around 35.000, to be precise–from residential networks all over the world. At this scale, it makes no sense to even consider blocking individual IPs, subnets, or entire networks. Due to the open nature of the project, geo-blocking isn’t an option either.
The main problem is time. The URLs accessed in the attack are the most expensive ones the wiki offers since they heavily depend on the database and are highly dynamic, requiring some processing time in PHP. This is the worst-case scenario since it throws the server into a death spiral.
First, the database starts to lag or even refuse new connections. This, combined with the steadily increasing server load, leads to slower PHP execution.
At this point, the website dies. Restarting the stack immediately solves the problem for a couple of minutes at best until the server starves again.
Anubis is a program that checks incoming connections, processes them, and only forwards “good” connections to the web application. To do so, Anubis sits between the server or proxy responsible for accepting HTTP/HTTPS and the server that provides the application.
Many bots disguise themselves as standard browsers to circumvent filtering based on the user agent. So, if something claims to be a browser, it should behave like one, right? To verify this, Anubis presents a proof-of-work challenge that the browser needs to solve. If the challenge passes, it forwards the incoming request to the web application protected by Anubis; otherwise, the request is denied.
As a regular user, all you’ll notice is a loading screen when accessing the website. As an attacker with stupid bots, you’ll never get through. As an attacker with clever bots, you’ll end up exhausting your own resources. As an AI company trying to scrape the website, you’ll quickly notice that CPU time can be expensive if used on a large scale.
I didn’t get a single notification afterward. The server load has never been lower. The attack itself is still ongoing at the time of writing this article. To me, Anubis is not only a blocker for AI scrapers. Anubis is a DDoS protection.
AI is the “most aggressive” example of “technologies that are not done ‘for us’ but ‘to us.’”
Well said.
Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.
First Albatross, First Out
Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)
The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes
AI tarpit 2: Iocaine
thanks for the links. the more I read of this the more based it is
Thank you!!
This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍
It absolutely doesn’t. The only model that has “gone nuts” is Grok, and that’s because of malicious code pushed specifically for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
what models are going nuts?
Not sure if OP can provide sources, but it makes sense kinda? Like AI has been trained on just about every human creation to get it this far, what happens when the only new training data is AI slop?
Nice … I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.
We’re racing towards the Blackwall from Cyberpunk 2077…
Already there. The blackwall is AI-powered and Markov chains are most definitely an AI technique.
All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
I will cite the scientific article later when I find it, but essentially you’re wrong.
water != energy, but i’m actually here for the science if you happen to find it.
This particular graph is because a lot of people freaked out over “AI draining oceans” that’s why the original paper (I’ll look for it when I have time, I have a exam tomorrow. Fucking higher ed man) made this graph
What about training an AI?
Asking ChatGPT a question doesn’t take 1 hour like most of these… this is a very misleading graph
This is actually misleading in the other direction: ChatGPT is a particularly intensive model. You can run a GPT-4o class model on a consumer mid to high end GPU which would then use something in the ballpark of gaming in terms of environmental impact.
You can also run a cluster of 3090s or 4090s to train the model, which is what people do actually, in which case it’s still in the same range as gaming. (And more productive than 8 hours of WoW grind while chugging a warmed up Nutella glass as a drink).
Models like Google’s Gemma (NOT Gemini these are two completely different things) are insanely power efficient.
I didn’t even say which direction it was misleading, it’s just not really a valid comparison to compare a single invocation of an LLM with an unrelated continuous task.
You’re comparing Volume of Water with Flow Rate. Or if this was power, you’d be comparing Energy (Joules or kWh) with Power (Watts)
Maybe comparing asking ChatGPT a question to doing a Google search (before their AI results) would actually make sense. I’d also dispute those “downloading a file” and other bandwidth related numbers. Network transfers are insanely optimized at this point.
Actually if you think about it AI might help climate change become an actual catastrophe.
It is already!
we’re rolling out renewables at like 100x the rate of ai electricity use, so no need to worry there
Yeah, at this rate we’ll be just fine. (As long as this is still the Reagan administration.)
yep the biggest worry isn’t AI, it’s India
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/india-co2-emissions/
The west is lowering its co2 output while India is slurping up all the co2 we’re saving:
This doesn’t include China of course, the most egregious of the co2 emitters
AI is not even a tiny blip on that radar, especially as AI is in data centres and devices which runs on electricity so the more your country goes to renewables the less co2 impacting it is over time
Could you add the US to the graphs, as EU and West are hardly synonymous - even as it descends into Trumpgardia.
China has that massive rate because it manufactures for the US, the US itself is a huge polluter for military and luxury NOT manufacturing
I’ve been think about this for a while. Consider how quick LLM’s are.
If the amount of energy spent powering your device (without an LLM), is more than using an LLM, then it’s probably saving energy.
In all honesty, I’ve probably saved over 50 hours or more since I starred using it about 2 months ago.
Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I’m not suffering through search-engine hell any more.
Just writing code uses almost no energy. Your PC should be clocking down when you’re not doing anything. 1GHz is plenty for text editing.
Does ChatGPT (or whatever LLM you use) reduce the number of times you hit build? Because that’s where all the electricity goes.
Except that half the time I dont know what the fuck on doing. It’s normal for me to spend hours trying to figure out why a small config file isnt working.
That’s not just text editing, that’s browsing the internet, referring to YouTube videos, or wallowing in self-pity.
That was before I started using gpt.
Are you using your PC less hours per day?
Yep, more time for doing home renovations.
That’s irl cyberpunk ice. Absolutely love that for us.
Nice one, but Cloudflare do it too.
The Arstechnica article in the OP is about 2 months newer than Cloudflare’s tool
Why are the photos all ugly biological things
The reason you’re seeing biological photos in AI articles lately is tied to a recent but underreported breakthrough in processor technology: bio-silicon hybrids. They’re early-stage biological processors that integrate living neural tissue with traditional silicon circuits. Several research labs, including one backed by DARPA and the University of Kyoto, have successfully grown functional neuron clusters that can perform pattern recognition tasks with far less energy than conventional chips.
The biological cells react more collectively and with a higher success rate than the current systems. Think of it kind of how a computer itself is fast but parts can wear out (water cooled tubes or fan), whereas the biological cell systems will collectively react and if a few cells die, they may just create more. It’s really a crazy complex and efficient breakthrough.
The images of brains, neurons, or other organic forms aren’t just symbolic anymore—they’re literal. These bio-processors are being tested for edge computing, adaptive learning, and even ethical decision modeling.
I know what I’m going to try and research tomorrow.
Also, we inch closer and closer to servitors every day.
The actual reason is that the use of biological photos is a design choice meant to visually bridge connect artificial intelligence and human intelligence. These random biological photos help to convey the idea that AI is inspired by or interacts with human cognition, emotions, or biology. It’s also a marketing tactic: people are more likely to engage with content that includes familiar, human-centered visuals. Though it doesn’t always reflect the technical content, it does help to make abstract or complex topics more relatable to a larger/extended audience.
I see what you-gpt did there
I’m going to assume half of that comment is wrong
Some of it, yeah. I typed up the middle, then ran a separate prompt, and added to it. If you can see the edits, the original was organic and then the edit was adding to it
That’s… actually quite terrifying.
The sci-fi concern over whether computers could ever be truly “alive” becomes a lot more tangible when literal living biological systems are implemented.
Wait, what?! Like… biocomputers?
It’s just bullshit
For an AI model to scrape 😈
Ive read a paper going of biological computing. Its a very real field of research.
