• @passepartout@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2605 days ago

    AI is the “most aggressive” example of “technologies that are not done ‘for us’ but ‘to us.’”

    Well said.

    • @rdri@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      405 days ago

      Wait till you realize this project’s purpose IS to force AI to waste even more resources.

      • @kuhli@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        895 days ago

        I mean, the long term goal would be to discourage ai companies from engaging in this behavior by making it useless

      • @lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        65 days ago

        That’s war. That has been the nature of war and deterrence policy ever since industrial manufacture has escalated both the scale of deployments and the cost and destructive power of weaponry. Make it too expensive for the other side to continue fighting (or, in the case of deterrence, to even attack in the first place). If the payoff for scraping no longer justifies the investment of power and processing time, maybe the smaller ones will give up and leave you in peace.

    • Oniononon
      link
      fedilink
      English
      155 days ago

      im sad governments dont realize this and regulate it.

      • DontMakeMoreBabies
        link
        fedilink
        English
        25 days ago

        Governments are full of two types: (1) the stupid, and (2) the self-interested. The former doesn’t understand technology, and the latter doesn’t fucking care.

        Of course “governments” dropped the ball on regulating AI.

    • @andybytes@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      105 days ago

      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.

      • @newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        85 days ago

        Dumbest sentiment I read in a while. People, even kids, are pretty much aware of what’s happening (remember Fridays for Future?), but the rich have coopted the power apparatus and they are not letting anyone get in their way of destroying the planet to become a little richer.

      • @untorquer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        75 days ago

        Unclear how AI companies destroying the planet’s resources and habitability has any relation to a political philosophy seated in trauma and ignorance except maybe the greed of a capitalist CEO’s whimsy.

        The fact that the powerful are willing to destroy the planet for momentary gain bears no reflection on the intelligence or awareness of the meek.

  • @arc@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    14
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    I’ve suggested things like this before. Scrapers grab data to train their models. So feed them poison.

    Things like counter factual information, distorted images / audio, mislabeled images, outright falsehoods, false quotations, booby traps (that you can test for after the fact), fake names, fake data, non sequiturs, slanderous statements about people and brands etc… And choose esoteric subjects to amplify the damage caused to the AI.

    You could even have one AI generate the garbage that another ingests and shit out some new links every night until there is an entire corpus of trash for any scraper willing to take it all in. You can then try querying AIs about some of the booby traps and see if it elicits a response - then you could even sue the company stealing content or publicly shame them.

  • @antihumanitarian@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    344 days ago

    Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They’re a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.

    Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they’re a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you’d have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.

    So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.

  • @Zacryon@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    605 days ago

    I suppose this will become an arms race, just like with ad-blockers and ad-blocker detection/circumvention measures.
    There will be solutions for scraper-blockers/traps. Then those become more sophisticated. Then the scrapers become better again and so on.

    I don’t really see an end to this madness. Such a huge waste of resources.

    • @enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      115 days ago

      the rise of LLM companies scraping internet is also, I noticed, the moment YouTube is going harsher against adblockers or 3rd party viewer.

      Piped or Invidious instances that I used to use are no longer works, did so may other instances. NewPipe have been broken more frequently. youtube-dl or yt-dlp sometimes cannot fetch higher resolution video. and so sometimes the main youtube side is broken on Firefox with ublock origin.

      Not just youtube but also z-library, and especially sci-hub & libgen also have been harder to use sometimes.

    • @arararagi@ani.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      95 days ago

      Well, the adblockers are still wining, even on twitch where the ads como from the same pipeline as the stream, people made solutions that still block them since ublock origin couldn’t by itself.

    • @glibg@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      75 days ago

      Madness is right. If only we didn’t have to create these things to generate dollar.

      • @MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2
        edit-2
        4 days ago

        I feel like the down-vote squad misunderstood you here.

        I think I agree: If people made software they actually wanted , for human people , and less for the incentive of “easiest way to automate generation of dollarinos.” I think we’d see a lot less sophistication and effort being put into such stupid things.

        These things are made by the greedy, or by employees of the greedy. Not everyone working on this stuff is an exploited wagie, but also this nonsense-ware is where “market demand” currently is.

        Ever since the Internet put on a suit and tie and everything became abou real-life money-sploitz, even malware is boring anymore.

        New dangerous exploit? 99% chance it’s just another twist on a crypto-miner or ransomware.

    • Richard
      link
      fedilink
      English
      135 days ago

      Don’t be too happy. For every such attempt there are countless highly technical papers on how to filter out the poisoning, and they are very effective. As the other commenter said, this is an arms race.

        • @MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          24 days ago

          I don’t think they meant that. Probably more like

          “Don’t upload all your precious data carelessly thinking it’s un-stealable just because of this one countermeasure.”

          Which of course, really sucks for artists.

  • heyWhatsay
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1045 days ago

    This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍

  • IninewCrow
    link
    fedilink
    English
    735 days ago

    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.

    • IndiBrony
      link
      fedilink
      English
      455 days ago

      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.

      • @Zozano@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        I’ve been thinking 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 started using it about 2 months ago.

        Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I’m not suffering through search-engine hell any more.

        Edit:

        Lemmy when someone uses AI to get a cheap, fast answer: “Noooo, it’s killing the planet!”

        Lemmy when someone uses a nuclear reactor to run Doom: Dark Ages on a $20,000 RGB space heater: “Based”

        • @xthexder@l.sw0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          2
          edit-2
          5 days ago

          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.

          • @Zozano@aussie.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            4
            edit-2
            4 days ago

            Except that half the time I dont know what the fuck I’m 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.

            • @xthexder@l.sw0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              5
              edit-2
              5 days ago

              It sounds like it does save you a lot of time then. I haven’t had the same experience, but I did all my learning to program before LLMs.

              Personally I think the amount of power saved here is negligible, but it would actually be an interesting study to see just how much it is. It may or may not offset the power usage of the LLM, depending on how many questions you end up asking and such.

              • @Zozano@aussie.zone
                link
                fedilink
                English
                45 days ago

                It doesn’t always get the answers right, and I have to re-feed its broken instructions back into itself to get the right scripts, but for someone with no official coding training, this saves me so much damn time.

                Consider I’m juggling learning Linux starting from 4 years ago, along with python, rust, nixos, bash scripts, yaml scripts, etc.

                It’s a LOT.

                For what it’s worth, I dont just take the scripts and paste them in, I’m always trying to understand what the code does, so I can be less reliant as time goes on.

    • Prox
      link
      fedilink
      English
      55 days ago

      We’re racing towards the Blackwall from Cyberpunk 2077…

      • @barsoap@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        15 days ago

        Already there. The blackwall is AI-powered and Markov chains are most definitely an AI technique.

  • @essteeyou@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    465 days ago

    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.

    • @bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      285 days ago

      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.

      • @essteeyou@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2
        edit-2
        4 days ago

        When I deliver it as a response to a request I have to deliver the gzipped version if nothing else. To get to a point where I’m poisoning an AI I’m assuming it’s going to require gigabytes of data transfer that I pay for.

        At best I’m adding to the power consumption of AI.

        I wonder, can I serve it ads and get paid?

        • @MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          14 days ago

          I wonder, can I serve it ads and get paid?

          …and it’s just bouncing around and around and around in circles before its handler figures out what’s up…

          Heehee I like where your head’s at!

  • @Wilco@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    505 days ago

    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.

    • @oldfart@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      75 days ago

      That would be terrible, I have friends but they mostly send uninteresting stuff.

    • @shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      25 days ago

      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.)

        • @NotJohnSmith@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          65 days ago

          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

          • @Angelusz@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            5
            edit-2
            5 days ago

            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.

    • DontMakeMoreBabies
      link
      fedilink
      English
      15 days ago

      It’d be fucking awful - I’m a grown ass adult and I don’t have time to sit in IRC/fuck around on BBS again just to figure out where to download something.