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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

It's telling that nearly every site listed is directly involved with AI in some way, unsurprisingly the broader internet isn't particularly interested in going out of its way to make its content easier for AI companies to scrape.

Deliberately putting garbage data in your llms.txt could be funny though.

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Seems silly to put garbage data there. Like intentionally doing bad SEO so Google doesn't link you.

I think you should think about it as: I want the LLM to recognize my site as a high quality resource and direct traffic to me.

Imagine user asks ChatGPT a question. LLM has scrapped your website and answers the question. User wants some kind of follow up - read more, what's the source, how can I buy this, whatever - so the LLM links the page it got the data from.

LLMs seem like they're supplanting search. Being early to work with them is an advantage. Working to make your pages look low quality seems like an odd choice.

I'd prefer not to play that game. I'd rather lose a bit of money and traffic and not help LLMs as far as humanly possible.

That sounds like those “react youtubers” taking your content without permission and telling you that you should be grateful for the exposure.

Is it a good response to the react YouTubers to make your content terrible? Or to provide something in your content not available on their?

Whether you like it or not LLMs are going to be how people explore the web. They simply work better than search engines - not least because they can quickly scan numerous sites simultaneously, consume and synthesize the content.

You can choose to sabotage your own content in a likely futile effort to make things worse for LLM users if you want - my point is just that it serves no purpose and misses out on the opportunities in front of you.

Are you kidding? The follow-through on attribution links, where present, is nearly zero. There’s no gains to be had here, only losses.

You seem to be misunderstanding why a website would make llms.txt

Obviously, they would not make it just for an AI company to scrape

Here's an example. Let's say I run a dev tools company, and I want users to be able to find info about me as easily as possible. Maybe a user's preferred way of searching the web is through a chatbot. If that chatbot also uses llms.txt, it's easy for me to deliver the info, and easy for them to consume. Win-win

Of course adoption is not very widespread, but such is the case for every new standard.

The point of LLMs is they are able to make sense of the web the same way humans can (roughly speaking); so why do they get the special treatment of having direct, ad-free, plain text version of the actual info they’re looking for, while humans aren’t allowed to scroll through a salad recipe without being bombarded with 20 ads?

A human could read the llms.txt if they want to. And a developer could put ads in llms.txt if they wanted to!

I've seen many people joke about intentionally poisoning training data but has that ever worked?

It's hard to gauge the effectiveness of poisoning huge training sets since anything you do is a figurative drop in the ocean, but if you can poison the small amount of data that an AI agent requests on-the-fly to use with RAG then I would guess it's much easier to derail it.

This study shows that controlling 0.1% may be enough.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13722v1

I have noticed some popular copied but incorrect leetcode examples leaking into the dataset.

I suspect it depends on domain specificity, but that seems within the ability of an SEO spammer or decentralized group of individuals.

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