- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
Some key excerpts:
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.
The typical web crawler doesn’t appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.
Since they made and deployed a proof-of-concept, Aaron B said their pages have been hit millions of times by internet-scraping bots. On a Hacker News thread, someone claiming to be an AI company CEO said a tarpit like this is easy to avoid; Aaron B told 404 Media “If that’s, true, I’ve several million lines of access log that says even Google Almighty didn’t graduate” to avoiding the trap.
This looks interesting. I’d probably combine it with model poisoning - giving each page longer chunks of text, containing bullshit claims and “grammar of slightly brokenness”; so if the data is used to train a model with, the result gets worse.
By now i’ve seen like 6 or 7 projects on either trapping or outright poison content for LLM bots, and yesterday i saw this one which outright modifies the HTML of your page making it harder to steal and instead replaces it with a random prompt, someone asks it to summarize a blogpost and instead the thing starts talking about poodles or something, while normal browser users notice nothing