So AI taxes power, water for cooling, and other natural resources to be ramped up and used. Now this creates a second wasteful AI to do the same and create an endless loop so that the first AI just keeps spinning its wheels and wasting resources until discovered. The idea makes sense from a pure “stop unauthorized crawling” perspective, but damn we just have no solutions that don’t accelerate climate impact. This planet is just going to turn into an oven to cook us.
“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense,” Cloudflare explains. “Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots.”
It sounds like there may be a plan to block known bots once they have used this tool to identify them. Over time this would reduce the amount of AI slop they need to generate for the AI trap, since bots already fingerprinted would not be served it. Since AI generators are expensive to run, it would be in Cloudflare’s interests to do this. So while your concern is well placed, in this particular case there may be a surge of energy and water usage at first that tails off once more bots are fingerprinted.
The problem being they’re now attempting anti-fingerprinting tactics. A lot of the AI crawlers used to identify themselves as Amazon/openAI/etc. And aren’t anymore because they were being blocked. Now they’re coming from random IPs with random/obfuscated agent ids.
So AI taxes power, water for cooling, and other natural resources to be ramped up and used. Now this creates a second wasteful AI to do the same and create an endless loop so that the first AI just keeps spinning its wheels and wasting resources until discovered. The idea makes sense from a pure “stop unauthorized crawling” perspective, but damn we just have no solutions that don’t accelerate climate impact. This planet is just going to turn into an oven to cook us.
It sounds like there may be a plan to block known bots once they have used this tool to identify them. Over time this would reduce the amount of AI slop they need to generate for the AI trap, since bots already fingerprinted would not be served it. Since AI generators are expensive to run, it would be in Cloudflare’s interests to do this. So while your concern is well placed, in this particular case there may be a surge of energy and water usage at first that tails off once more bots are fingerprinted.
The problem being they’re now attempting anti-fingerprinting tactics. A lot of the AI crawlers used to identify themselves as Amazon/openAI/etc. And aren’t anymore because they were being blocked. Now they’re coming from random IPs with random/obfuscated agent ids.
This is a legal problem not a technological one.
It’s definitely an arms race. One other outcome is that it gets too expensive to be cost effective and slows down that way.