Everyone should start doing this. Once the AI companies engorge themselves on enough garbage and start to see a negative impact to their own products, they'll stop running up your traffic bills.
Maybe you don't even need a full LLM. Just a simple transformer that inverts negative and positive statements, changes nouns such as locations, and subtly nudges the content into an erroneous state.
I’d also like to add image obfuscation on the static generator side - as it stands now, anything other than text or html gets passed through unchanged.
> Everyone should start doing this. Once the AI companies engorge themselves on enough garbage and start to see a negative impact to their own products, they'll stop running up your traffic bills.
I agree, and not just to discourage them running up traffic bills. The end-state of what they hope to build is very likely to be extremely for most regular people [1], so we shouldn't cooperate in building it.
[1] And I mean end state. I don't care how much value you say you get from some AI coding assistant today, the end state is your employer happily gets to fire you and replace you with an evolved version of the assistant at a fraction of your salary. The goal is to eliminate the cost that is our livelihoods. And if we're lucky, in exchange we'll get a much reduced basic income sufficient to count the rest of our days from a dense housing project filled with cheap minimum-quality goods and a machine to talk to if we're sad.
If anything this will level the playing field, and creativity will prevail.
No, you still need money. Lots of money.
> If anything this will level the playing field, and creativity will prevail.
That's a fantasy. The people that already have money will prevail (for the most part).
Or just wait for after the AI flood has peaked & most easily scrapable content has been AI generated (or at least modified).
We should seriously start discussing the future of the public web & how to not leave it to big tech before it's too late. It's a small part of something i am working on, but not central. So i haven't spend enough time to have great answers. If anyone reading this seriously cares, i am waiting desperately to exchange thoughts & approaches on this.
It’s basically about how in 2012, with the original internet overrun by spam, porn and malware, all the large corporations and governments got together and created a new, tightly-controlled clean internet. Basically how modern Apple & Disneyland would envision the internet. On this internet you cannot choose your software, host your own homepage or have your own e-mail server. Everyone is linked to a government ID.
We’re not that far off:
- SaaS
- Gmail blocking self-hosted mailservers
- hosting your own site becoming increasingly cumbersome, and before that MySpace and then Meta gobbled up the idea of a home page a la GeoCities.
- Secure Boot (if Microsoft locked it down and Apple locked theirs, we would have been screwed before ARM).
- Government ID-controlled access is already commonplace in Korea and China, where for example gaming is limited per day.
In the Hacker game, as a response to the new corporate internet, hackers started using the infrastructure of the old internet (“old copper lines”) and set something up called the SwitchNet, with bridges to the new internet.
Part of the issue, the humans all behaved the same way previously. Just slower.
All the scraping, and web downloading. Humans have been doing that for a long time. Just slower.
It's the same issue with a lot of society. Mean, hurtful humans, made mean hurtful bots.
Always the same excuses too. Company / researchers make horrible excrement, knowing full well its going harm everybody on the world wide web. Then claim they had no idea. "Thoughts and prayers."
The torture that used to exist on the world wide web of copy-pasta pages and constant content theft, is now just faster copy-pasta pages and content theft.
You need to impose cost. Set up QoS buckets, slow suspect connections down dramatically (almost to the point of timeout).
I've had massive AI bot traffic from M$, blocked several IPs by adding manual entries into the recidive jail. If they come back and disregard robots.txt with disallow * I will run 'em through fail2ban.