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But the project description describes it as a project to stop AI crawlers?
> Weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests to stop AI crawlers
Why would they use AI art for the first Anubis mascot until GitHub users called out the hypocrisy on the issue tracker?
Why would they use Stable Diffusion art in their blogposts until Mastodon and Bluesky users called them out on it?
AI slop is mass produced, but there's likely great potential for really useful AI models with very limited scopes.
So, I hope you know the entire story behind Anubis, firstly they were hosting their own git server (I think?) and amazon's ai related department was basically ddosing their server in some sense by trying to scrape it and they created anubis in a way to prevent that.
The idea isn't that new, it is just proof of work and they created it firstly for their own use and I think that they are An AI researcher/ related to AI, so for them using AI pics wasn't that big of a deal and pretty sure that they had some reason behind it and even that has been changed.
Stop whining about free projects/labour man. The same people comment oh well these AI scrapers are scraping so many websites and taking livelihood of website makers and now you have someone who just gave it to ya for free and you are nitpicking the wrong things.
You can just fork it without the anime images or without the AI thing if you don't align with them and their philosophy.
Man now I feel the mandela effect as I read it somewhere on their blog or any thing that they themselves feel the hypocrisy or something along that (pardon me if I am wrong, I usually am) But they themselves (I think?) would like to get rid of working in the AI industry while making anti AI scraper but they might need more donations iirc and they themselves know the hypocrisy.
If the argument is all this AI support for an anti-AI crawler, I don't think it's a good argument to ignore it.
and as long as the 3C's aren't followed, there's no subtly here. You don't get to use "edited" art in a commercial product except in fair use cases.
>Stop whining about free projects/labour man.
Yes, I'm sure this sort of argument is coming from someone with very subtle and nuanced thoughts. "Free" ruined the internet very quickly when corporations figured out that's all they need for entry. They can monetize behind the scenes or after market capture.
lets see, the thing that I am trying to say is that, in my opinion even with AI art, that is not the point.
The point remains whether anubis is actually useful at what it does and is it worth it.
Also I understand free ruined the internet very quickly, but this is free and open source. Open source has made the internet better a 100 times imo.
I genuinely don't think that the author had any wrong intentions with using AI art.
and since we have opened the box, might as well, talk about the AI thoughts.
Basically, I think that there are two schools of thoughts towards AI/Ai art. Its efficacy at doing what it is advertised to say, its effect on markets, its effect on climate.
The efficacy at doing what it can do : I absolutely agree that there is a lot of hype around it but AI art even open source models have become good enough for some very "basic tasks" imo, Like I had a discord server and I actually used AI art as the logo because people wanted a logo and I am not an artist and I can't comission anyone just for something so small. I immediately told everyone this and nobody seemed to care and afterwards and after some more people joined,literally noone asked if it was ai generated or not. I was expecting a single person to notice but nope.
Another point is about climate, I think that AI itself is pretty efficient, there were posts about how it compares to a lightbulb but the problem is how massively it is used at scale and how much the demand can change and how it can affect the power demand of that datacentre and if power demand changes, then that requires the power generators to tweak their speed and tldr, in that process, it becomes really inefficient but still I am actually surprised that we are calling out on AI when there is bitcoin which literally all it does with its pow is waste energy and there are other cryptocoins which can literally have close to 0 fees and instant but nope the crypto market is in a bubble. Stablecoins are the only good thing to come out of it.
Now that being said, its effect on job markets. I am not an artist but I imagine it is frustating to see AI replicate art. but the point is, nobody wants AI art!! There is no economic incentive to make AI art unless genuinely can't comission someone (which is what I did in my server) or just are using it as a backup art untill you can comission one (which is what anubis did) but in my opinion, if someone can't already pay like I couldn't in my discord server, I would have just build one myself or used some CC:0 art with full credits .
Which is why I don't consider AI art "art". Its a backup, more like editing. The people will throw wrenches at you if you get caught using it. And that's a good thing. but we do need to realize maybe using ai art as a backup and people should definitely push against ai art so that if possible, real artists gets the job done.
I don't consider ai art to be anymore of a gimmick but even then, I mean I can understand if people are using ai art as backups untill they can comission real art or build one themselves.
That isn't the issue. The issue is that this tool is not fit for purpose and is inappropriate to be used by the projects that have adopted it.
The proof of work scheme is idiotic. As explained in the article, it's super easy to mine enough tokens to bypass for any bad actors, while it interfers and wastes the time of good actors.
It's almost like the author deliberately designed a tool that only looks like it is doing something while actually trivially allowing the very thing it was supposedly built to prevent.
You raise a good point man, what do you suggest should be done instead of what anubis is doing right now for the same outcome(getting not effectively ddosed by AI scrapers) ?
> The traditional solution to blocking nuisance crawlers is to use a combination of rate limiting and CAPTCHAs. The CAPTCHA forces vistors to solve a problem designed to be very difficult for computers but trivial for humans. This isn’t perfect of course, we can debate the accessibility tradeoffs and weaknesses, but conceptually the idea makes some sense.
> Anubis – confusingly – inverts this idea. It insists visitors solve a problem trivial for computers, but impossible for humans.
Fundementally, the idea that PoW is a good way to tell humans from bots just doesn't work.
Captchas, rate limiting, authentication, etc are all part of the solution.
The more bespoke a captcha solution is, the less likely that bots, especially the kind of low effort bots that ignore rate limits and hammer sites, will have the ability to break it.
Arguably, anubis has a much better harm-vs-protection ratio at much lower difficulty setting where it functions less as a PoE system and more as an obscure way to block lowe effort bots. Of course, the more it gets adopted, the less well this will work.