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Comment by MyNameIsNickT | Hacker News Reader

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users.

We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor things like page load time, time to first token and payload size, with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.

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That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in the way”.

Said another way, if done in the background the user wouldn’t even notice unless they typed and submitted their query before the check completed. In the realistic scenario this would complete before they even submit their request.

Many cloud products now continuously send themselves the input you type while you are typing it, to squeeze the maximum possible amount of data from your interactions.

I don’t know whether ChatGPT is one of those products, but if it is, that behavior might be a side effect of blocking the input pipeline until verification completes. It might be that they want to get every single one of your keystrokes, but only after checking that you’re not a bot.

It's still possible to let users already type from the beginning, just delay sending the characters until checks are complete. Hold them in memory until then.

Instagram was uploading the images while the user were adding post details, back in 2012!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913919

No one seem to use or care about their own product anymore. Only uses dashboard and metrics, which does not explain the full situation.

That makes total sense from a UX perspective though, the ChatGPT thing does not.

there were a lot of helpdesk chats doing the same, so you could see users typing messages, then deleting words, etc before hitting send.

This was actually one of the reasons why Instagram felt smooth.

Another thing but Facebook/Instagram have also detected if a person uploads an image and then deletes it and recognizes that they are insecure, and in case of TEENAGE girls, actually then have it as their profile (that they are insecure) and show them beauty products....

I really like telling this example because people in real life/even online get so shocked, I mean they know facebook is bad but they don't know this bad.

[Also a bit offtopic, but I really like how the item?id=3913919 the 391 came twice :-) , its a good item id ]

I wondered if ChatGPT streams my message to the GPU while I type it, because the response comes weirdly fast after I submit th message. But I don't know much about how this stuff works.

Likely prefix caching among many other things

I just checked the network inspector, the only thing it does per key press is to generate an autocomplete list. It doesn't seem too hard to wait with the autocomplete generation until after whichever checks you run pass.

I developed the first version of Google's equivalent of this (albeit theirs actually computes a constantly rotating key from the environment, it doesn't just hard-code it in the program!).

The reason it has to block until it's loaded is that otherwise the signal being missing doesn't imply automation. The user might have just typed before it loaded. If you know a legit user will always deliver the data, you can use the absence of it to infer something about what's happening on the client. You can obviously track metrics like "key event occurred before bot detection script did" without using it as an automation signal, just for monitoring.

That doesn't make sense. The server would wait to process anything until after you received the signal. If it doesn't arrive within a reasonable period of time that tells you something, the same as right now.

If you mean that you can infer client side tampering with the page contents you could still do that - permit typing but don't permit the submit action on the client. The user presses enter but nothing happens until the check is complete. There you go, now you can tell if the page was tampered with (not that it makes much difference tbh).

The typing actions have to be observed by JavaScript. It's not different to any other JS blocking page load because it's needed for the site to work, that's just how the web works.

Why can't you allow typing and just consume the state of the text input as the initial state of the js logic?

how you type is also part of the signal

Then track that data and upload when you can make the request.

This doesn't seem to be the same thing. The article isn't about being unable to type before JavaScript starts executing. If I understand correctly, you're unable to type until a network request to Cloudflare returns. The question is: why not allow typing during that network request? JavaScript is running and it's observing the keystrokes. Everyone understands that you can't use a React application until JavaScript is running. They're asking why the network request doesn't happen in the background with the user optimistically allowed to type while waiting for it to return.

(Separately, I don't think the article has adequately demonstrated this claim. They just make the claim in the title. The actual article only shows that some network request is made, and that the request happens after the React app is loaded, but not that they prevent input until it returns. Maybe it's obvious from using it, but they didn't demonstrate it.)

The network request to Cloudfare is part of the JavaScript (in effect).

I don't think that's true in this case; the React application loads first, fully initializes, and then sends its state via Cloudflare request. It can't happen at the same time, by design. It has to happen serially. The article's claim is that you can't type during this second request. Frankly, I wonder if this is actually true at all. The article did not demonstrate this, and there's no problem if you can actually interact as soon as the React application is running. ChatGPT running abuse prevention and React applications requiring JavaScript to work are both uncontroversial, I think.

OK, I haven't looked at the exact sequencing here. But generally, once the action goes back to the anti-abuse service for checking the user can't be allowed to change what they're submitting. The view the anti-abuse system saw has to match what the app server sees.

Still incorrect because the user in this case is being prohibited from submitting anything at all.

This perfectly explains the trade-off. But from a pure UX perspective, freezing the input pipeline feels uniquely hostile. They could buffer the keystrokes invisibly in the background instead of locking the cursor, which creates the jarring perception that the site is actively fighting the user.

can you reformulate your message?

Mike is saying that if you allow users to type before the scripts are fully loaded, there is no way to tell the difference between a human and bot.

Blocking until load means that human interaction is physically impossible, so you are certain that any input before that is automated.

If you allow typing, this distinction vanishes

Load fewer scripts so it doesn't take that long?

Remember you’re talking to a vibe coder who just stares at code being printed out by AI.

That’s a big assumption. It’s a brand new account, might be a bot. PR/astroturfing is a great use case for agentic AI

You cannot know what verifications they use. I could argue the disabled textbox is some sort part of the verification process. Humans will click on it while bots won't.

Seems like a trivially simple verification to defeat.

You can defeat all client side verification by definition if you know what verification is run.

Sounds like anti-distillation to me. But, know what? Meh.

I’d be inclined to agree with the “meh” if their entire product weren’t built off pirated content

Keyboard response feels 10x slower in ChatGPT Projects (possibly for reasons other than react state).

Because the way they have the server architecture setup and how it loads the screen. You don’t even want all the bots hitting servers

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

Seriously. The hypocrisy is staggering!

" Integrity at OpenAI .. protect ... abuse like bots, scraping, fraud "

Did you mean to use the word hypocrisy. If not, I'm happy to have said it.

I just want to note, that it is well covered how good the support is for actual malware...

The irony is thick

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.

The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less.

It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity in this case is quite superficial.

The cost is so marginal that many, many websites have been forced to add cloudflare captchas or PoW checks before letting anyone access them, because the server would slow to a crawl from 1000 scrapers hitting it at once otherwise.

The issue is that there are so many awful webmasters that have websites that take hundreds of milliseconds to generate and are brought down by a couple requests a second.

OpenAI must be the most awful webmasters of all, then, to need such sophisticated protections.

Because you say it is?

I obviously disagree. I mean, on top of this we are talking about not-open OpenAI.

I understand why OpenAI is trying to reduce its costs, but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load, especially those crawlers that ignore robots.txt and hide their identities. This is direct financial damage and it's particularly hard on nonprofit sites that have been around a long time.

These are ChatGPT and Claude Desktop crawlers we’re talking about? Or what is it exactly? Are these really creating significant load while not honoring robots.txt?

Genuinely interested.

I bet dollars to doughnuts that 95% of the traffic is from Claude and ChatGPT desktop / mobile and not literal content scraping for training.

That wouldn't explain the 1000x increase in traffic for extremely obscure content, or seeing it download every single page on a classic web forum.

And doing it over, and over, and over and over again. Because sure it didn't change in the last 8 years but maybe it's changed since yesterdays scrape?

They seem to mostly be third-party upstarts with too much money to burn, willing to do what it takes to get data, probably in hopes of later selling it to big labs. Maaaybe Chinese AI labs too, I wouldn't put it past them.

OpenAI et al seem to mostly be well-behaved.

Is this the first time you are reading HN? Every day there are posts from people describing how AI crawlers are hammering their sites, with no end. Filtering user agents doesn't work because they spoof it, filtering IPs doesn't work because they use residential IPs. Robots.txt is a summer child's dream.

> but it simply isn't true that AI crawlers aren't creating very significant load.

And how much of this is users who are tired of walled gardens and enshitfication. We murdered RSS, API's and the "open web" in the name of profit, and lock in.

There is a path where "AI" turns into an ouroboros, tech eating itself, before being scaled down to run on end user devices.

It is direct financial damage if my servers not on an unmetered connection — after years of bills coming in around $3/mo I got a surprise >$800 bill on a site nobody on earth appears to care about besides AI scrapers.

It hasn’t even been updated in years so hell if I know why it needs to be fetched constantly and aggressively, - but fuck every single one of these companies now whining about bots scraping and victimizing them, here’s my violin.

If you can identify the scraper you should have a valid legal case to recover damages.

Only if they had a robots.txt for their site.

I hadn’t even considered that. Don’t know why that comment is greyed out or downvoted.

It’s a static site that hasn’t been updated since 2016—- so it’s .. since been moved to cloudflare r2 where it’s getting a $0.00 bill, and it now has a disallow / directive. I’m not sure if it’s being obeyed because the cf dash still says it’s getting 700-1300 hits a day even with all the anti bot, “cf managed robots” stuff for ai crawlers in there.

The content is so dry and irrelevant I just can’t even fathom 1/100th of that being legitimate human interest but I thought these things just vacuumed up and stole everyone’s content instead of nailing their pages constantly?

No, it's still illegal to DDoS sites that don't have robots.txt.

You are right, I hadn't considered that aspect.

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things.

I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree

Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

I miss the www where the .html was written in vim or notepad.

ahh yes, fresh off reading "Html For Dummies" I made my first tripod.com site

For me it was making a petpage for my neopets using https://lissaexplains.com/

It's still up in all its glory.

This is great! The name reference also made me smile.

Just did that for a test frontend for a module I needed to build (not my primary job so don't know anything about UI but running in browsers was a requirement), so basic HTML with the bare minimum of JS and all DOM. Colleagues were very surprized. And yes, vim is still the goto editor and will be for a long time now all "IDE" are pushing "AI" slop everywhere.

It still can be. Do it. Go make your website in M$ Frontpage, for all I care

Shameless plug: My music homepage follows the HTML 2.0 spec and is written by hand

https://sampleoffline.com/

heck yeah B)

> I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree

Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?

When every AI company does it from multiple data centers... yes it's distributed.

Uncoordinated DDoS, when multiple search and AI companies are hammering your server.

You should see Cloudflare's control panel for AI bot blocking. There are dozens of different AI bots you can choose to block, and that doesn't even count the different ASNs they might use. So in this case I'd say that a DDoS is a decent description. It's not as bad as every home router on the eastern seaboard or something, but it's pretty bad.

> Are you sure it's a DDoS and not just a DoS?

I think these days it’s ‘DAIS’, as in your site just DAIS - from Distributed/Damned AI Scraping

Yes, it is. The worst offenders hammer us (and others) with thousands upon thousands of requests, and each request uses unique IP addresses making all per-IP limits useless.

We implemented an anti-bot challenge and it helped for a while. Then our server collapsed again recently. The perf command showed that the actual TLS handshakes inside nginx were using over 50% of our server's CPU, starving other stuff on the machine.

It's a DDoS.

> Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

Wild eh.

If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".

What's a database after all.

Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article. Authors spend their blood, sweat and tears writing and then OpenAI comes to Hoover it up without a care in the world about license, copyright or what constitutes fair use. But don’t you dare scrape their slop.

> Also wild that from the tech bro perspective, the cost of journalism is just how much data transfer costs for the finished article.

Exactly. I think the unfairness can be mitigated if models trained on public information, or on data generated by a model trained on public information, or has any of those two in its ancestry, must be made public.

Then we don't have to hit (for example) Anthropic, we can download and use the models as we see fit without Anthropic whining that the users are using too much capacity.

I think the parent is just pointing out that these things lie on a spectrum. I have a website that consists largely of static content and the (significant) scraping which occurs doesn't impact the site for general users so I don't mind (and means I get good, up to date answers from LLMs on the niche topic my site covers). If it did have an impact on real users, or cost me significant money, I would feel pretty differently.

Putting everything on a spectrum is what got us into this mess of zero regulation and moving goal posts. It's slippery slope thinking no matter which way we cut it, because every time someone calls for a stop sign to be put up after giving an inch, the very people who would have to stop will argue tirelessly for the extra mile.

I’d argue putting everything in terms of black and white is the bigger issue than understanding nuance

Generalizing with "everything", "all", etc exclusive markers is exactly the kind of black/white divide you're arguing against. What happened to your nuanced reality within a single sentence? Not everything is black and white, but some situations are.

The person he's replying to argued against putting things on a spectrum. Does that not imply painting everything in black and white? Thus his response seems perfectly sensible to me.

He argued against putting things in a spectrum in many instances where that would be wrong, including the case under the question. What's your argument against that idea? LLM'ed too much lately?

He argued against and the response presented a counterargument. Both were based around social costs and used the same wording (ie "everything").

You made a specious dismissal. Now you're making personal attacks. Perhaps it's actually you who is having difficulty reasoning properly here?

What mess are you talking about? The existence of LLMs? I think it's pretty neat that I can now get answers to questions I have.

This is something I couldn't have done before, because people very often don't have the patience to answer questions. Even Google ended up in loops of "just use Google" or "closed. This is a duplicate of X, but X doesn't actually answer the question" or references to dead links.

Are there downsides to this? Sure, but imo AI is useful.

It's just repackaged Google results masquerading as an 'answer.' PageRank pulled results and displayed the first 10 relevant links and the LLM pulls tokens and displays the first relevant tokens to the query.

Just prompt it.

1. LLMs can translate text far better than any previous machine translation system. They can even do so for relatively small languages that typically had poor translation support. We all remember how funny text would get when you did English -> Japanese -> English. With LLMs you can do that (and even use a different LLM for the second step) and the texts remain very close.

2. Audio-input capable LLMs can transcribe audio far better than any previous system I've used. They easily understood my speech without problems. Youtube's old closed captioning system want anywhere close to as good and Microsoft's was unusable for me. LLMs have no such problems (makes me wonder if my speech patterns are in the training data since I've made a lot of YouTube videos and that's why they work so well for me).

3. You can feed LLMs local files (and run the LLM locally). Even if it is "just" pagerank, it's local pagerank now.

4. I can ask an LLM questions and then clarify what I wanted in natural language. You can't really refine a Google search in such a way. Trying to explain a Google search with more details usually doesn't help.

5. Iye mkx kcu kx VVW dy nomszrob dohd. Qyyqvo nyocx'd ny drkd pyb iye. - Google won't tell you what this means without you knowing what it is.

LLMs aren't magic, but I think they can do a whole bunch of things we couldn't really do before. Or at least we couldn't have a machine do those things well.

Off topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

I think some people use hosting that is paid per request/load, so having crawlers make unwanted requests costs them money.

*> Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

Because ingress and compute costs often increase with every request, to the point where AI bot requests rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hobbyist operator was expecting to send.

It keeps the other projects hosted on the same server or network online. Blackhole routes are pushed upstream to the really big networks and they push them to their edge routers, so traffic to the affected IPs is dropped near the sender's ISP and doesn't cause network congestion.

DDoSers who really want to cause damage now target random IPs in the same network as their actual target. That way, it can't be blackholed without blackholing the entire hosting provider.

All this reactionary outrage in the comments is funny. And lame.

Yes, for the vast majority of the internet, serving traffic is near zero marginal cost. Not for LLMs though – those requests are orders of magnitude more expensive.

This isn't controversial at all, it's a well understood fact, outside of this irrationally angry thread at least. I don't know, maybe you don't understand the economic term "marginal cost", thus not understanding the limited scope of my statement.

If such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all. But no, they're rare edge cases, from a combination of shoddy scrapers and shoddy website implementations, including the lack of even basic throttling for expensive-to-serve resources.

The vast majority of websites handle AI traffic fine though, either because they don't have expensive to serve resources, or because they properly protect such resources from abuse.

If you're an edge case who is harmed by overly aggressive scrapers, take countermeasures. Everyone with that problem should, that's neither new nor controversial.

The extent of the utilization is new.

The number of bots that try to hide who they are, and don't bother to even check robots.txt is new.

It's not a cost for me to scrape LLM.

It is a cost for me for LLM to scrape me.

Why should I care about costs that have when they don't care about the costs I have?

"such DDOSes as you mention were common, such a scraping strategy would not have worked for the scraper at all"

They are common. The strategy works for the llm but not for the website owner or users who can't use a site during this attack.

The majority of sites are not handling AI fine. Getting Ddosed only part of the time is not acceptable. Countermeasures like blocking huge ranges can help but also lock out legimate users.

> They are common

Any actual evidence of the alleged scope of this problem, or just anecdotes from devs who are mad at AI, blown out of proportion?

Love AI so can't be that. Not devs website owners. Yes ask AI for stats.

One euro is marginal for me for someone else it is their daily meal.

"They are rare edge cases" are we on the same internet?

And yet I have to pay in my time and cash to handle the constant ddos'es from the constant LLM scraping

Have you not seen the multiple posts that have reached the front page of HN with people taking self-hosted Git repos offline or having their personal blogs hammered to hell? Cause if you haven't, they definitely exist and get voted up by the community.

Are they, actually?

Lets not try to qualify the wrongs by picking a metric and evaluating just one side of it. A static website owner could be running with a very small budget and the scraping from bots can bring down their business too. The chances of a static website owner burning through their own life savings are probably higher.

Perhaps the long play is to destroy all small hobby websites until only a AI directed web is left.

If you're truly running a static site, you can run it for free, no matter how much traffic you're getting.

Github pages is one way, but there are other platforms offering similar services. Static content just isn't that expensive to host.

THe troubles start when you're actually running something dynamic that pretends to be static, like Wordpress or Mediawiki. You can still reduce costs significantly with CDNs / caching, but many don't bother and then complain.

It's true it can be done but many business owners are not hip to cloudflare r2 buckets or github pages. Many are still paying for a whole dedicated server to run apache (and wordpress!) to serve static files. These sites will go down when hammered by unscrupulous bots.

Setting aside the notion that a site presenting live-editability as its entire core premise is "pretending to be static", do the actual folks at Wikimedia, who have been running a top 10 website successfully for many years, and who have a caching system that worked well in the environment it was designed for, and who found that that system did not, in fact, trivialize the load of AI scraping, have any standing to complain? Or must they all just be bad at their jobs?

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-th...

That is ridiculous.

You imply that "an expensive llm service" is harmed by abuse, but, every other service is not? Because their websites are "static" and "near-zero marginal cost"?

You have no clue what you are talking about.

Well he’s a simp

60% of our traffic is bot, on average. Sometimes almost 100%.

It's not like those models are expensive because the usefulness that they extracted from scraping others without permission right? You are not even scratching the surface of the hypocrisy

  > net-zero marginal cost

Lol, you single-handedly created a market for Anubis, and in the past 3 years the cloudflare captchas have multiplied by at least 10-fold, now they are even on websites that were very vocal against it. Many websites are still drowning - gnu family regularly only accessible through wayback machine.

Spare me your tears.

Absolutely not, the former relies on controversial ideas to qualify as legal.

Stealing the content from the whole planet & actively reducing the incentive to visit the sites without financial restitution is pretty bad.

> Scraping static content

How do you know the content is static?

It's more ironic because without all the scraping openai has done, there would have been no ChatGPT.

Also, it's not just the cost of the bandwidth and processing. Information has value too. Otherwise they wouldn't bother scraping it in the first place. They compete directly with the websites featuring their training data and thus they are taking away value from them just as the bots do from ChatGPT.

In fact the more I think of it, I think it's exactly the same thing.

This leads me to thinking: I ask chatGPT a question and they get the answer from gamefaqs.

But what happens if gamefaqs disappears because of lack of traffic?

Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.

They cannot create original content.

Well they can make some up, like hallucination. That's an additional problem: when the original site that provided the training data is gone: how can they use verify the AI output to make sure it's correct?

It will remain in their scraped data so they can keep including it in their later training datasets if they wish. However it won't be able to do live internet searches anymore. And it will not generate new content of course. Especially not based on games released after the site codes down so it doesn't know. Though it could of course correlate data from other sources that talk about the game in question.

>Can LLM actually create or only regurgitate content.

Contrary to what others say, LLMs can create content. If you have a private repo you can ask the LLM to look at it and answer questions based on that. You can also have it write extra code. Both of these are examples of something that did not exist before.

In terms of gamefaqs, I could theoretically see an LLM play a game and based on that write about the game. This is theoretical, because currently LLMs are nowhere near capable enough to play video games.

Getting scraped by abusive bots who bring down the website because they overload the DB with unique queries is not marginal. I spent a good half of last year with extra layers of caching, CloudFlare, you name it because our little hobby website kept getting DDoS'd by the bots scraping the web for training data.

Never in 15 years if running the website did we have such issues, and you can be sure that cache layers were in place already for it to last this long.

Interesting how other people's cost is "near-zero marginal cost" while yours is "an expensive LLM service". Also, others' rights are "fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use" while yours is "direct financial damage". I like how you frame this.

It’s not for techbros to decide at what threshold of theft it’s actually theft. “My GPU time is more valuable than your CPU time” isn’t a thing and Wikipedias latest numbers on scraping show that marginal costs at scale are a valid concern

Bait or genuine techbro? Hard to say

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server

It's not possible to know in advance what is static and what is not. I have some rather stubborn bots make several requests per second to my server, completely ignoring robots.txt and rel="nofollow", using residential IPs and browser user-agents. It's just a mild annoyance for me, although I did try to block them, but I can imagine it might be a real problem for some people.

I'm not against my website getting scraped, I believe being able to do that is an important part what the web is, but please have some decency.

I don't think a rule along the lines of "Doing $FOO to a corporate is forbidden, but doing $FOO to a charitable initiative is fine" is at all fair.

What "$FOO" actually is, is irrelevant. I'm curious how you would convince people that this sort of rule is fair.

The corp can always ban users who break ToS, after all. They don't need any help. The charitable initiative can't actually do that, can they?

Speak for yourself.

AI providers also claim to have small marginal costs. The costs of token is supposedly based on pricing in model training, so not that different from eg your server costs being low but the content production costs being high. And in many cases AI companies are direct competitors (artists, musicians etc.)

(TBH it's not clear to me that their marginal costs are low. They seem to pick based on narrative.)

You’re describing the tragedy of the commons. No single raindrop thinks it’s responsible for the flood.

"near-zero marginal costs". For whom exactly????

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

My website serving git that only works from Plan 9 is serving about a terabyte of web traffic monthly. Each page load is about 10 to 30 kilobytes. Do you think there's enough organic, non-scraper interest in the site that scrapers are a near-zero part of the cost?

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server

The gall. https://weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers

You are, of course, ignoring the production costs of the static content that OpenAi is stealing.

Stop justifying their anti-social behavior because it lines your pockets.

I'm sure the copyright holders would consider your use of their content as direct financial damage

I interpreted scraping to mean in the context of this:

> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users

I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.

This is bad why? Well yeah for openai because all they want it to be is a free teaser to get people hooked and then enshittify.

Morally I don't see any issues with it really.

> I have no doubt that many people see the free ChatGPT access as a convenient target for browser automation to get their own free ChatGPT pseudo-API.

Not that hard - ChatGPT itself wrote me a FF extension that opened a websocket to a localhost port, then ChatGPT wrote the Python program to listen on that websocket port, as well as another port for commands.

Given just a handful of commands implemented in the extension is enough for my bash scripts to open the tab to ChatGPT, target specific elements, like the input, add some text to it, target the relevant chat button, click it, etc.

I've used it on other pages (mostly for test scripts that don't require me to install the whole jungle just to get a banana, as all the current playright type products do). Too afraid to use it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc because if they detect that the browser is being drive by bash scripts they can terminate my account.

That's an especially high risk for Gemini - I have other google accounts that I won't want to be disabled.

Quite sure even literal thieves would consider thievery a form of abuse.

Yeah, they know it's bad, they just don't think the rules apply to them.

You nailed it.

It’s only bad if you’re a closed, for-profit entity

</sarcasm>

Was that sarcasm? Speaking of it, what parts of OpenAI are still open?

I know, always hard to tell on HN. Added the relevant declarative tag

The front door…

For what it's worth, the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.

OpenAI documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

Anthropic documents how to opt out of scraping here: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropi...

I'm not sure if Gemini lets you opt out without also delisting you from Google search rankings.

I think opt-outs are a bit backwards, ethically speaking. Instead of asking for permission, they take unless you tell them to no longer do it from now on.

I can imagine their models have been trained on a lot of websites before opt outs became a thing, and the models will probably incorporate that for forever.

But at least for websites there's an opt-out, even if only for the big AI companies. Open source code never even got that option ;).

> a lot of websites

It was a dataset of the entirety of the public internet from the very beginning that bypassed paywalls etc, there’s virtually nothing they haven’t scraped.

Performing an automated action on a website that has not consented is the problem. OpenAI showing you how to opt-opt is backwards. Consent comes first.

Bit concerning that some professional engineers don't understand this given the sensitive systems they interact with.

Death by a thousand opt-outs.

Just respect the bloody robots.txt and hold your horses. Ask your precious product built on the relentless, hostile scraping to devise a strategy that doesn't look like a cancer growth.

> the big AI companies do have opt out mechanisms for scraping and search.

PRESS RELEASE: UNITED BURGLARS SOCIETY

The United Burglars Society understands that being burgled may be inconvenient for some. In response, UBS has introduced the Opt-Out system for those who wish not to be burgled.

Please understand that each burglar is an independent contractor, so those wishing not to burgled should go to the website for each burglar in their area and opt-out there. UBS is not responsible for unwanted burglaries due to failing to opt-out.

It seems likely that they buy data from companies who don't obey the same constraints however, making it easy to launder the unethical part through a third party.

Question: if I disallow all of OpenAI's crawlers, do they detect this and retroactively filter out all of my data from other corpuses, such as CommonCrawl?

The fact is my data exists in corpuses used by OpenAI before I was even aware anyone was scraping it. I'm wondering what can be done about that, if anything.

They know that the rules apply to them. They hope that they can avoid being caught.

The rules are that a large corporate AI company is able to scrape literally everything, and will use the full force of the law and any technology they can come up with to prevent you as an individual or a startup from doing so. Because having the audacity to try to exploit your betters would be "Theft".

Small mitigation (by no way absolving them): isolated developers, different teams. Another way: they see "stealing" of their compute directly in their devop tools every day, but are several abstractions away from doing the same thing to other people.

They never have and feel they are above reproach. Anytime Altman opens his mouth that's apparent. It's for the good of humanity dontcha know. LOL

Engineers working on AI and AI enthusiasts are seemingly incapable of seeing the harm they cause, so I disagree.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

What’s being stolen? AI output isn’t copyrightable, and it’s not like they’re ripping pages out of a book

They can train on the outputs i.e. distillation attacks.

How is that theft?

The levels of irony that shouldn't be possible...

It's not scraping they're concerned about, it's abusing free GPU resources to (anonymously) generate (abusive) content.

Church, politicians, moralists are all the biggest hypocrites that want to teach you something.

I agree on politicians, no idea what a "moralist" is supposed to be but there are good and bad churches and church goers; lumping all church goers into one category calling them hypocrites is wrong. There are many good churches and church goers who help people and their communities.

"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"

And have absolutely no reservations about making such an obvious statement on a public forum

It’s funny because the first AI scraper I remember blocking was from OpenAI’s, as it got stuck in a loop somehow and was impacting the performance of a wiki I run. All to violate every clause of the CC BY-NC-SA license of the content it was scraping :)

They don't want anyone to take that which they have rightfully stolen.

Exactly! How dare you have access to their stolen content in the midst of them doing the same.

Well at least they have 1 person working on "Integrity" so can't be too bad

This

It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and functionality?

Firefox multicontainers are pretty cool. But it’s an advanced process that most people wouldn’t do or do correctly.

The possibilities with Firefox multi containers and automation scripts as well are truly endless.

It's also possible to make Firefox route each container through a different proxy which could be running locally even which then can connect to multiple different VPN's. I haven't tried doing that but its certainly possible.

It's sort of possible to run different browsers with completely new identities and sometimes IP within the convenience of one. It's really underrated. I don't use the IP part of this that I have mentioned but I use multi containers quite a lot on zen and they are kind of core part of how I browse the web and there are many cool things which can be done/have been done with them.

I love the containers too. My current use case is to keep my YouTube account separate from my Google one. Google doesn't need all that behavioural data in one place.

It's a pity Firefox doesn't get the praise it deserves half as much as it cops criticism.

It is absolutely not an advanced process. It's clicking a gui. It's not advanced thinking to understand profiles. It's a basic ability to hold multiple things in your mind at once. Telling people that's difficult only increases the societal problem that being ignorant is ok.

“Difficult” is a relative term. They were saying it was a difficult concept for them, not you. In order to save their ego, people often phrase those events to be inclusive of the reader; it doesn’t feel as bad if you imagine everyone else would struggle too. Pay attention and you’ll notice yourself doing it too.

“Ignorant” is also infinite - you’re ignorant of MANY things as well, and I’m sure you would struggle with things I can do with ease. For example, understanding the meaning behind what’s being said so I know not to brow-beat someone over it.

Mostly right; it’s not that it was difficult for me. It’s that normal people are never going to do it.

I’m almost endlessly surprised by the probably-autistic-spectrum responses to tech things from people with no idea how things seem to other people.

Mostof the people I met outside work wouldn't understand this concept.

I think you're lucky to hang around people whose heads don't hurt when they think.

Meet me in a cafe and I will sign a JWT saying you're not a bot. You can submit this to whoever will accept it.

Sounds like we’re bringing back the PGP key signing parties

The sooner we do the better.

I wonder what the PGP signing concept does to thwart people who want to profit and don't care about the public good. It seems like anyone who attends a signing party can sell their key to the highest bidder, leading to bots and spammers all over again.

You can never prevent things like this, but you can make it expensive enough to effectively solve the problem for almost all use cases.

In the flat trust model we currently use most places, it's on each person to block each spammer, bot, etc. The cost of creating a new bot account is low so it's cheap to make them come back.

On a web of trust, if you have a negative interaction with a bot, you revoke trust in one of the humans in the chain of trust that caused you to come in contact with that bot. You've now effectively blocked all bots they've ever made or ever will make... At least until they recycle their identity and come to another key signing party.

Once you have the web in place though, a series of "this key belongs to a human" attestations, then you can layer metadata on top of it like "this human is a skilled biologist" or "this human is a security expert". So if you use those attestations to determine what content your exposed to then a malicious human doesn't merely need to show up at a key signing party to bootstrap a new identity, they also have to rebuild their reputation to a point where you or somebody you trust becomes interested in their content again.

Nothing can be done to prevent bad people from burning their identities for profit, but we can collectively make it not economical to do so by practicing some trust hygiene.

Key signing establishes a graph upon which more effective trust management becomes possible. It on its own is likely insufficient.

Definitely miss those!

If apple approves it, ive got a solution: A keyboardthat attests to your humanity https://typed.by/magicseth/2451#2NyGLfAQxmqRiAOTlaX7ma3G4d1o...

Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much effort the humans behind it put in!

Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

[0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contributors

Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.

Yes! That's what I'm getting at. This protocol optionally allows you to sign with your private key, but you don't have to for the protocol to provide utility. It could just be enough to say "if you trust magicseth's binary and apple, then this was typed one letter at a time"

There's nothing stopping folks from typing a message an LLM wrote one at a time, but the idea of increasing the human cost of sending messages is an interesting one, or at least I thought :-(

The problem is that it's not optional to end-users if sites enforce its use.

The other problem is that the device or company might decide not to attest for you.

For instance, the employee at Apple that decided to pull ICE Block from the store could decide that the "admissible in court" bit should be false if it looks like a police officer is in frame.

Similarly, the keyboard could decide your social credit score is too low, and just stop attesting. A court could order this behavior.

Or, you could fail mandatory age / id verification because your credit card expired, and then all the above + more could happen! Good luck getting through to credit card tech support at that point...

> Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X <emdash> it's Y" style.

....no. There's not a single occurrence of that.

https://keywitness.io/manifesto

There are six emdashes on that page. NONE of them are "it's not X it's why".

> Emails, messages, essays, code reviews, love letters — all suspect.

> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity.

> KeyWitness captures cryptographic proof at the point of input — the keyboard.

> When you seal a message, the keyboard builds a W3C Verifiable Credential — a self-contained proof that can be verified by anyone, anywhere, without trusting us or any central authority.

> That's an alphabet of 774 symbols — each carrying log2(774) ≈ 9.6 bits. 27 emoji for 256 bits.

> They're a declaration: this message was written by a person — one of the diverse, imperfect, irreplaceable humans who still choose to type their own words.

Clarifications: 4

Continuation from a list: 1

Could just be a comma: 1

"It's not X -- it's Y": 0.

If you're going to make lazy commentary about good writing being AI, please at least be sure that you're reading the content and saying accurate things.

Oh you think it's stupid? It was an attempt to encode an encryption key that isn't sent to the server in a way that is minimally invasive. The skintone emomis allow pretty high byte density, and also are cute!

Sorry it doesn't meet your needs.

There is irony in having an ai generated humanifesto. Could it be intentional? hmm?

Is there no irony in deriding a project for being potentially LLM generated, when it's goal is to aide people in differentiating? :shrug:

> We believe this can be solved — not by detecting AI, but by proving humanity

“It's not X -- it's Y": 1

It's either a bot, or someone who writes exactly like a bot. I don't care which it is, both go to the discard pile.

phew!

It’s a product for people who need help telling whether text was written by AI.

Maybe they deliberately write it like that, to filter out people who aren’t the target market?

It is largely written by iteration with an LLM! No need to speculate or analyze em dashes :-)

The emoji idea was mine. I like it :-) unfortunately it doesn't work in places like HN that strip out emoji. So I had to make a base64 encoding option.

The goal was to create an effective encryption key for the url hash (so it doesn't get sent to the server). And encoding skin tone with human emojis allows a super dense bit/visual character encoding that ALSO is a cute reference to the humans I'm trying to center with this project!

From their “how it works” page:

> The server stores an encrypted blob it can't decrypt. We couldn't read your messages even if we wanted to. That's not a policy — it's math.

If you can’t tell that this is AI slop then maybe KeyWitness does solve a real problem after all.

Hi! I want anonymity! I also want to be able to prove what level of effort has been put in to something. I think there's room for both. This is an encrypted proof that I wrote something on a keyboard that tracks fingers. The protocol allows you to optionally sign it with your identity, but that isn't strictly required.

It is an attempt at putting something into the conversation more than just "OSS is broken because there are too many slop PRs." What if OSS required a human to attest that they actually looked at the code they're submitting? This tool could help with that.

Yes LLMs were used greatly in the production of this prototype!

It doesn't change the goal of the experiment! or it's potential utility! Do you see any potential area in your world where some piece of this is valuable?

Somewhere there is someone 3D printing a keyboard cover that an llm can type with.

I'm actually building a physical keyboard for those people who don't have iphones! Though given the reaction I'm seeing here, I probably won't share it with this audience :-P it has capacitive keys, a secure enclave, and a fingerprint sensor.

Please do share. This sort of tech is necessary, for better or worse, and I'd have a bunch of use cases in mind for it!

This does not prove anything and it is only avalible to users with X.com accounts (you need a X.com account to download the app).

Hi! You don't need an x.com account to download, that's just the easiest way to dm me. If you're actually interested, I can let you try it! The source is also available.

It proves 1) that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it. 2) that my app signed it.

If you trust the binary I've distributed is the same as the one on the app store, then it also proves: 3) that it was typed on my keyboard not using automation (though as others have mentioned, you could build a capacitive robot to type on it) 4) that the typer has the same private key as previous messages they've signed (if you have an out of band way to corroborate that's great too) 5) optionally, that the person whose biometrics are associated with the device approved it.

There is also an optional voice to text mode that uses 3d face mesh to attempt to verify the words were spoken live.

Not every level of verification is required by the ptrotocol, so you could attest that it was written on a keyboard, but not who wrote it (not yet implemented in the client app).

The protocol doesn't require you to run my app, if you compile it yourself, you can create your own web of trust around you!

>that an apple device with a secure enclave signed it.

What Apple devices are supported? All I have is a iPhone 4 running a old iOS version(pre iOS 7) (which I will not update and I don't think has a secure enclave) and a M1 mac mini and some lightning earpods and a apple thunderbolt display and some USB-A chargers and some old MacBooks.

I saw something about android (https://typed.by/manifesto#:~:text=Android,Integrity) on the website, but it mentioned Play Integrity which I do not have becuase I use LineageOS for MicroG.

I think that the concept is stupid becuase it would require to somehow prove that the app is not modified(which is impractical) and there is no stylus on a motor or fake screen(which is also impractical).

I think that a better aproach would be to form a Web Of Trust where only people's (not just humans, this would include all animals and potentially aliens but no clankers) certificates are signed, but with a interface that is friendly to people who are not very into technology but with some sort of way to not have who your friends are revealed, but this would still allow someone to get a attestation for their robot.

Oh Gawd, not this idea again!

This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades.

It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails.

The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one finger from a minor kitchen accident, and you'll be typing completely differently for a few days.

Or, because I just walked into my office eating a juicy apple with one hand and I'm in a hurry typing my PW with my other hand because someone just called with an urgent issue I've got to fix, aaaaannnd, your software balks because I'm typing with a completely different cadence.

The list of valid reasons for failure is endless wherein a person's usual solid patterns are good 90%+ of the time, but will hard fail the other 10% of the time. And the acceptable error rate would be 2-4 orders of magnitude less.

It's a mystery how people go all the way to building software based on an idea that seems good but is actually bad, without thinking it through, or even checking how often it has been done before and failed?

That's not what this is. at all.

You might want to check out “How it Works” on the site as none of what you said applies: https://typed.by/how

Then why does your link claim the following?

> While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.

> Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.

I’m sceptical about this idea but, to give it full credit, it’s a custom piece of hardware that would presumably be more accurate than previous software-only attempts. Maybe it will actually work this time, idk, although I still don’t really see the point.

Vibe copy is a hell of a drug.

Yes. This is from that page:

>>While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.

>>Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.

This very precisely makes my point:

Yes, the typing pattern of any human is highly and possibly even completely unique to that human — UNTIL any of a myriad of everyday issues makes it falsely deny access because the human's typing pattern has changed in a way the human can't do anything to fix at the moment.

If you are only attempting to distinguish a human from an automated system, it'll be better, until someone just starts recording the same patterns and re-playing them to this upstream process; then its a mere race to who can get their hooks in at a lower level. And someone is always going to say: "Oh, this system can identify the specific human", and we're off to the races again.

So, no. Unless you can account for ALL of the reasonable everyday failure modes, typing with either hand, any finger or combination of fingers out of commission for a minute or a lifetime, this idea will fail.

IOW, if you are doing this, it does not matter what you are doing afterwards.

You are assuming that a human's particular typing pattern is consistent, when the fact is that any number of ordinary events will render your assumption false (one or more fingers bandaged, sprained, whatever, or one hand occupied ATM).

This is not a hardware or software problem, and no amount of code, hardware, or cleverness will fix it; this is a fundamental mismatch between your assumption vs reality.

can confirm. am weird enough to routinely flag as "inhuman".

thaaaaaaaaanks

The first widely distributed and open source version of this typist timing validation idea I saw (and incorporated into my own software at the time) was released by Michael Crichton as part of a password 2nd-factor checker (1st factor a known phrase or even your name, the 2nd factor being your idiosyncratic typing pattern) in Creative Computing magazine that printed the code.

Original here: https://archive.org/details/sim_creative-computing_1984-06_1...

You’re getting a negative reaction from others but I share this feedback in good faith: I don’t understand what problem your product is supposed to solve.

Yeah I guess the cryptographic stuff sounds vaguely impressive although it’s been a long time since I had to think about cryptography in detail. But what is this _for_? I’m going to buy an expensive keyboard so that I can send messages to someone and they’ll know it’s really me – but it has to be someone who a) doesn’t trust me or any of our existing communication channels and b) cares enough to verify using this weird software? Oh and it’s important they know I sent it from a particular device out of the many I could be using?

Who is that person? What would I be sending them? What is the scenario where we would both need this?

Also the server can’t read the message but the decryption key is in the URL? So anyone with the URL can still read it? Then why even bother encrypting it?

Maybe this is one of those cases where I’m so far outside your target market that it was never supposed to make sense to me but I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you need to work on your elevator pitch.

Just sharing my honest reaction.

Why 256-bit key AES? It brings nothing but longer key. 128-bit is more than enough. Please don't mention PQC :fire:

"why do you need more compute resources? Please don't mention computer programs"

Doesn’t really make sense, because any service can just say “you must paste your human-attestation JWT here to use this service” and plenty of people will.

You can just decay your trust level based on the `iat` value. That way people will need to keep buying me coffee. I can optionally chide them for giving out their token.

If you're engaging with the idea seriously, I suppose we'd need to build a reputation or trust network or something.

Although if you're talking about replay attacks specifically, there are other crypto based solutions for that.

I am engaging with this seriously! I don't know if there will be any real solution. But I think it's worth exploring.

My point is that there probably is no way in principle to distinguish between a human user utilizing automation on their own behalf in good faith (e.g. RSS readers) and bad faith automations.

That's a feature, not a bug.

A human is personally responsible for a bot acting on their behalf. If your bot behaves, nothing is going to happen. If you keep handing out your personal keys to shitty misbehaving bots, then you will personally get banned - which gives you a pretty good incentive to be a bit more discerning about the bots you use.

Yes, everything should just be agnostic, as long as the incentives work out it's all fine. Like if we had worked out micropayments for the web (not saying that's a good idea per se), then who cares if you're a bot or a human when you're paying a toll either way? Flipping it to be a cost rather than payment is functionally equivalent.

>It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

What are you talking about? It works fine with firefox with RFP and VPN enabled, which is already more paranoid than the average configuration. There are definitely sites where this configuration would get blocked, but chatgpt isn't one of them, so you're barking up the wrong tree here.

Is your interlocutor barking up the wrong tree, or are you missing the forest for the trees?

According to the OP:

> The program checks 55 properties spanning three layers: your browser (GPU, screen, fonts), the Cloudflare network (your city, your IP, your region from edge headers), and the ChatGPT React application itself (__reactRouterContext, loaderData, clientBootstrap).

I guess Firefox VPN will hide the IP at least. But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP? Because if not, the so-called privacy offered by this configuration is outdated.

You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.

>But what about the other data, is it faked by RFP?

Yes, RFP spoofs or at least somewhat obfuscates/normalizes GPU/screen/font info. The rest are integrity validations of the server/app, and not really identifying in any way.

>You might be fingerprinted by OpenAI right now, as “that guy with all the Firefox anti-fingerprinting stuff enabled, even though it breaks other sites”.

I'm not sure what the broader point you're trying to make here is. Is fingerprinting bad? Yes. All things being equal, I'd rather not have it than have it, but at the same time it's not realistic to expect openai to serve anonymous requests from anyone. Back when chatgpt was first launched you had to sign up and verify your phone number. Compared to mandatory logins, fingerprinting is definitely the lesser evil here.

I wasn’t thinking too hard about the distinction between an integrity check and an identifiable detail, and I guess it makes sense that you’d be okay with one and not the other.

My broader point would have been that if OpenAI can identify you even when using Firefox RFP, it doesn’t make sense to give them credit for letting you use ChatGPT with RFP enabled. But maybe I was making too many assumptions.

I am not Nick, but there's a few ways that world happens: the free tier goes away and what people pay for more correctly reflects what they use, this all becomes cheap enough that it doesn't matter, or we come up with an end to end method of determining usage is triggered by a person.

Another way is to just do better isolation as a user. That's probably your best shot without hoping these companies change policies.

Local models for privacy.

You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV. Staying at home is crappier but private.

Unfortunately for the first time moores law isn't helping (e.g. give a poor person an old laptop and install linux they will be fine). They can do that and all good except no LLM.

> You want to go to the world's best hotel? You are gonna be on their CCTV.

ironically, in high end hotels, there's often a lot less cctv. not none. just less. rich people enjoy privacy

So they’re not just hidden better? Does make sense.

Well, I can use the world‘s best safety deposit box without being on CCTV while I pass secrets in and out of it, right? Just not for free.

Bummer, this sounds like it is about to turn into a Monero ad (“let us pay privately”)

Probably not even hidden because rich people are also catching a lot of legal winds, in which case the hotel has no choice but to provide the material. Better not to have it in the first place. You don't want your hotel cams listed as evidence in a 500M$ divorce case I guess.

Also are hidden cameras even legal? I know here in EU they aren't.

In hotels of all tax brackets, you usually get a room key.

And the salient difference is that CCTV is simply defense-in-depth, not a primary means for authentication.

> Staying at home is crappier but private.

Doesn't make sense, my home is much more preferable to a hotel

With any luck, local models will be too (soon).

My local models didn't get >20h of outage this quarter like Claude did so in a way it's already the case.

I've been doing that for years. Cloudflare is slowly breaking more and more of the web.

What if I run a website and OpenAI produces bot traffic? Do they also consider it abuse when they do it?

There is also the browser I use to get Claude to route around people blocking its webfetch. Both Playwright and chrome-mcp.

Camoufox?

This is indeed what I do. And you also should. Separate browser for banking, trusted shipping sites etc, and the normal one.

Make sure not to browse the Internet without adblock and/or similar.

i am increasingly moving towards a model of 'no browser'.

search for me is now a proprietary index (like exa) that filters rubbish, with a zero data retention sla. so we don't need google profiling.

the content is distilled into markdown pulled from cloudflare's browser rendering api.

i let cloudflare absorb the torrent of trackers and robot checks, i just get md from the api with nothing else. cloudflare is poacher and gamekeeper.

an alternative is groq compound which can call browsers in parallel.

for interactive sites, or local ai browsing, i sometimes run a browser in a photon os docker with vnc, which gives you the same browser window but it runs code not on your pc.

that said little of my use is now interacting with websites, its all agentic search and websets so i don't have to spend mental energy on it myself

is this bad?

> It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

Every time I try this, I end up crossing wires (ie using the browser that 'works' for most things, more than the one that is 'broken')

Don’t know if it’s related to the article, but the chats ui performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats.

Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether.

I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad.

Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.

Same. It’s wild how bad it can get with just like a normal longer running conversation

Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag for typing each character. Typical bloated React.

Just because a web application uses React and is slow, it does not follow that it is slow because of React.

It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web applications in React, same as any other framework.

Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever used, and it is written in React.

Does not, in the seeming absence of other snappy examples and the overwhelming evidence of many, many slow React apps, the exception prove the rule?

There are plenty of snappy examples. Off the top of my head: Discord, Netflix, Signal Desktop, WhatsApp Web.

Discord, maybe. But Netflix and WhatsApp Web? Those are bloated cows, just less broken than average.

Those are all really poorly-performing.

Sure it's possible but those are a handful of exceptions against the norm, when the general approach so easily guides you towards bloat upon bloat that you have to be an expert to actively avoid going down that route.

In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.

They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.

The lost art of writing efficient code...

> Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.

This is generally called virtual scrolling, and it is not only an option in many common table libraries, but there are plenty of standalone implementations and other libraries (lists and things) that offer it. The technique certainly didn't originate with Netflix.

And yet ChatGPT does not use it.

GP was mentioning that a solution to the problem exists, not that Netflix specifically invented it. Your quip that the technique is not specific to Netflix bolsters the argument that OpenAI should code that in.

They didn't actually name the solution: the solution is virtualization.

They described Netflix's implementation, but if someone actually wanted to follow up on this (even for their own personal interest), Dynamic HTML would not get you there, while virtualization would across all the places it's used: mobile, desktop, web, etc.

I'm ignorant of the tech here. But I have noticed that ctrl-F search doesn't work for me on these longer chats. Which is what made me think they were doing something like virtual scrolling. I can't understand how the UI can get so slow if a bunch of the page is being swapped out.

Ctrl-A for select all doesn't work either. I actually wondered how they broke that.

Its been about three years but infinite scroll is naunced depending on the content that needs to be displayed. Its a tough nut to crack and can require a lot of maintenance to keep stable.

None of which chatgpt can handle presumably.

Yes, tables and lists, since they have a fixed height per item/row. Chat messages don't have a fixed height so its more difficult. And by more difficult I mean that every single virtual paging library that I've looked at in the past would not work.

But they do have constant height in the sense that, unless you resize the window horizontally, the height doesn’t change.

For what it’s worth, modern browsers can render absurdly large plain HTML+CSS documents fairly well except perhaps for a slow initial load as long as the contents are boring enough. Chat messages are pretty boring.

I have a diagnostic webpage that is a few million lines long. I could get fancy and optimize it, but it more or less just works, even on mobile.

Exactly, browsers can render it fast. It's likely a re-rendering issue in React. So the real solution is just preventing the messages from getting rendered too often instead of some sort of virtual paging.

Dynamic height of virtual scrolling elements is a thing. You just need to recalculate the scrollable height on the fly. tanstack's does it, as do some of the nicer grid libraries.

To be fair I haven't looked at any solutions in about a decade lol

This is how every scrolling list has been implemented since the 80s. We actually lost knowledge about how to build UI in the move to web

The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:

- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)

The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).

Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a toy, not a tool (working definition: can it handle realistic amount of data people would use for productive work - i.e. 10k rows, not 10 rows).

Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?

More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).

There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.

Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)

Desktop GUI toolkits aren't less flexible on layout, they're often more flexible.

We lost it because the web was never designed for applications and the support it gives you for building GUIs is extremely basic beyond styling, verging on more primitive than Windows 3.1 - there are virtually no widgets, and the widgets that do exist have almost no features. So everyone rolls their own and it's really hard to do that well. In fact that's one of the big reasons everyone wrote apps for Windows back in the day despite the lockin, the value of the built-in widget toolkit was just that high. It's why web apps so often feel flaky and half baked compared to how desktop apps tend(ed) to feel - the widgets just don't get the investment that a shared GUI platform allows.

Almost certainly running some sort of O(n^2) algorithm on the chat text every key press. Or maybe just insane hierarchies of HTML.

Either way, pretty wild that you can have billions of dollars at your disposal, your interface is almost purely text, and still manage to be a fuckup at displaying it without performance problems.

OpenAI sites are the only ones that do this to me. I have to keep a separate browser profile just for my OpenAI login with absolutely nothing installed on it or it'll end up being dogshit slow and unusable.

That's how eating your own dogshit works, or whatever was that saying

Hi Nick, first of all, very cool of you to respond here instead of letting us all sit in the dark. I think that's what makes HN special.

That said, is it not a little bit weird that you want to protect yourself from scraping and bots, when your entire company, product, revenue, and your employment, depends on the fact that OpenAI can bot and scrape literally every part of the internet? So your moat is non-hydrated react code in the frontend?

Don't beat up an engineer for decisions made by company leadership. It's really inappropriate.

Yeah, no one is responsible for what they do as long as someone else tells them to do it.

They decided to work at this company, I think it's a reasonable discussion to have?

While I would generally sympathize on that front, it doesn't really apply here.

None of the management-level desiderata he appealed to require that the user experience be broken this bad. There is very little bot deterrence from prevention of typing at that stage, while it heavily impacts user experience, especially on mobile.

I elaborate here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575982

Great to hear from a first-party source. I'm a Pro subscriber and my team spends well over two thousand dollars per month on OpenAI subscriptions. However, even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors.

Is this to be expected? I would presume that if I'm authenticated and paying, VPN use wouldn't be a worry. It would be nice to be able to use the tool whether or not I'm on a VPN.

> even when I'm logged in with my Pro account, if I'm using a VPN provider like Mullvad, I often have trouble using the chat interface or I get timeout errors

Heard from a founder who recently switched his company to Claude due to OpenAI's lagginess–it's absolutely an OpenAI problem. Not an AI problem in general.

> Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

How can first-party products protect themselves from abuse by OpenAI's bots and scraping?

This is a completely in-scope question.

How do we defend against your scraping, OpenAI?

I dont want any of my content scraped or seen by you all. Frankly, fuck you all for thinking my content is owned by you.

robots.txt bro https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots/

"bro": https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-anthropic-ai-ignore-r...

should be pretty easy to test and not rely on an anonymous source from a weird analytics company via business insider. are these bots actually from openai or are they just using their user agent? are they coming from openai ip ranges? etc. https://openai.com/gptbot.json

> should be pretty easy to test

I look forward to your results, whether or not they disprove the article.

Are all of OpenAI’s ip ranges known?

The article is from 2024. Is this still happening?

Do we have any evidence they started complying?

If not, we can conclude they did not, until such evidence shows up.

I’m genuinely curious to know whether there was a change in behavior especially after OpenAI informed about how to prevent scraping (robot.txt, etc.).

I am as well. Like, is there any evidence of a change, or can we assume nothing changed?

I use nginx conditionals and useragent checking, then respond with 418 or 410.

Probably too late now but my list needs updating

It's documented here: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

- which one is to stop you from hammering small servers with hundreds simultaneous connections?

- why don't you just respect existing robots.txt that apply to you already?

- does every LLM scraper seriously think the onus to opt out from the EVERY SINGLE SCRAPER is on the webmasters/owners?

>* - why don't you just respect existing robots.txt that apply to you already?*

>* - does every LLM scraper seriously think the onus to opt out from the EVERY SINGLE SCRAPER is on the webmasters/owners?*

I see value in asking explicitly, but let’s be real here: you know the answers. They feel entitled to vacuum up everything visible, any way they feel like, for some ratio of profit to thinking they’re reshaping humanity for the better. The opt-outs are ceremonial procedures to convince people (including themselves,) that people are actually volunteering this data. They don’t give a shit about you, your creative output, you life’s work, your server performance and bandwidth, or anything else beyond stuffing the great data pig.

Hi! It's all perfectly understandable - after all, we use things like Anubis to protect our services from OpenAI and similar actors and keep them available to the real users for exactly the same reasons.

>These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

Can you share these mitigations so we can mitigate against you?

It's just Cloudflare. Bypassing it is a whole industry.

I read the comment as “use it to mitigate against OpenAI bots scraping the web” and not to mitigate Cloudflare.

Well it's the same answer isn't it... use Cloudflare. And hope OpenAI doesn't have a backroom scraping deal with them, which they might.

Flaresolverr is one way. Isn’t perfect but bypasses a lot.

"we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"

The scary part is that you don't even see the irony in writing this.

Or, are you just okay "misusing" everyone for your own benefit?

Brand new account with 2 comments in this thread. How can we be sure you're not a bot deployed to defend OpenAI?

Please run Cloudflare's privacy invasive tool and share all the values it generates here so we can determine if you're a real person.

> because we want to keep free and logged-out access

But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?

Yep, on logged-in users too. The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers. Being logged in is one useful signal, but it doesn’t fully prevent automation, account abuse, or other malicious traffic, so we apply protections in both cases.

Nothing you do can fully prevent automation. Someone who wants to automate requests badly enough will be able to do it, especially when the “protections” are as easy to decrypt and analyze as the OP proved.

Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don’t use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name of “protection.”

Yeah, that's it. Also, it is a bit amusing to me - "We want to prevent automation", says the employee of Let's Automate Inc.

More like "We want your money, but don't want to provide service." Are you sure OpenAI isn't morphing into a finance/insurance company?

While OAI is one of the more hypocritical of the bunch, it is not uncommon for paid services to have some limitations in their terms of service. Like going in a store and buying stuff, it doesn't me a free for all doing whatever you want.

Limitations on the ChatGPT subscription should have to do with the usage limits of the tier you paid for (and I don't think anyone has a problem with that). If I'm in the limits of requests I paid for then it's usage rather than abuse.

"Abuse" checks should only come into play when someone tries to leverage the free tier. It reminds me of those cable companies that try to sell "unlimited" plans and then try to say customers who use more than x GB/month are abusing the service rather than just say what the real limits are because "unlimited" sounds better in marketing.

I'm glad you guys at least went with CloudFlare. LMarena went with Google's ReCaptcha, which is plain evil. It'll often gaslight you and pretend you failed a captcha of identifying something as simple as fire hydrants. Another lovely trick is asking you to identify bridges or busses, but in actuality it also wants you to identify viaducts or semi-trucks.

> The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers.

You are defining "Bots" and "Scrapers" as a subset of attackers, though.

Is this really fair? The value in your product came from people who wrote for other people, not bots, but your bot scraped them anyway.

There is no way to determine if a request that is coming from my browser is typed in by me or automated with a browser extension. Your only way to win this "war" on "attackers" is by forcing users into using your own application to access your product.

My browser extension (see my previous reply on this story) automates the existing open tab I have to all the different chat AIs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc).

I suppose all you can do is rate-limit each user.

Can't have those bots or scrapers running amok can we...

Would OpenAI also consider renumerations to every site they have scraped that had a robots.txt file and they chose to ignore it anyway? Feel free to not answer this question.

I have kind of lost count of how many content creators have said personally to me traffic is meaningfully down because of all these chatbots. The latest example is this poor but standup guy: moneyfortherestofus.com.

I'm really glad Hacker News disallows AI generated comments. The response I got from asking that question really is quite enlightening. Short answer: "no", long answer: "no -- fuck off", longer answer: "no -- fuck off -- if you want I can dig into whether or not you should fuck off harder"

Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on yours

"abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"

This has to be a joke, right?

I really can't tell for sure (new user posting a ridiculously hypocritical corporate message on a Sunday) but if GP actually works for OpenAI the lack of self-awareness is seriously striking

How?

Because OpenAI built their entire business around shamelessly scraping anything that had bits on it.

Maybe. But scraping isn't abuse. Seems a bit different?

Given that the scraping doesn't do any rate limiting and pisses on robots.txt, yes it is abuse

Is there any evidence OpenAI has been ignoring robots.txt for scraping purposes? AFAIK the main sources of that traffic are still unknown.

Quoting the OP

> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

That implies that OpenAI (or at least this employee) considers scraping abuse.

The top comment categorized scraping as abuse ("abuse such as [...] scraping") - that's precisely why some accuse its author of lack of self awareness.

Still feels very anti-consumer.

If every company behaved like you do, the internet would be a much worse place.

In fact, OpenAI has already made the Internet a much worse place, already much, much less open and much less optimistic about its own future than it was even five years ago...

"Integrity at OpenAI"

Basically an oxymoron at this point.

> A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

Thank you for the reply, Nick. It wouldn’t be a problem to disable the tracking for authenticated users then, would it?

It would because someone's KPI depends on number of tracked users lol

If logging in disabled all checks, all bots would just spam-create users first. Of course it needs to run for all users, without it being necessarily nefarious.

Paid users?

> OpenAI: These checks are part of how we protect products from abuse like bots, scraping, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

This would be fucking HILARIOUS if it wasn't so tragic.

It can be both

Manifest destiny for me, border enforcement for thee.

This kind of flawed thinking again. Like the natives didn't fight and lose wars against the manifest destiny types.

I don't think anybody claimed no Native Americans tried to fight back against their genocide?

It's painting border enforcement as somehow immoral. There is no sin in trying to be better at it than those before.

genociding people to take their land within their borders is generally frowned upon today

If only they were better at border control, maybe they wouldn't all get killed off.

yes, generally it is frowned upon today to genocide people and take their land within their borders

> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping,

Do you guys see the irony here?

They obviously get it. They just do not care.

But is the title true, is typing specifically blocked? Or does it just block submitting the text?

I ask because I have seen huge variations in load time. Sometimes I had to wait seconds until being able to type. Nowadays it seems better though.

> [...] we protect our first-party products from abuse like [...] scraping [...]

what an odd thing to say for someone whose product is built entirely on exactly that

sometimes I paste giant texts (think summarization) in the chatgpt (paid) webapp and I noticed that the CPU fans spin up for about 5 seconds after, as if the text is "processed" client side somehow. this is before hitting "submit" to send the prompt to the model.

I assumed it was maybe some tokenization going on client side, but now I realize maybe it's some proof of work related to prompt length?

Paying customer since inception here.

I presume the local ChatGPT.app has even more measures to prevent automation, right? Presumably privacy-invasive ones as it is customary these days?

Is there a way I can opt out? I really, really, really don't like it.

The way I use the products something like this. My main account on my MacBook - ChatGPT website, codex cli. Then, a Mac VM running via UTM with shared writable dir - anything more ‘shady’ in terms of permissions and for playing with new ai apps - eg ChatGPT/Codex standalone apps, Atlas, Claude desktop app etc. Seems to work decently enough. And I do totally agree that there should be a way to opt out of all these privacy invasive measures, especially after paying $200/mo

I don't trust what OpenAI says. Sam Altman gives shivers, and these kinds of blog posts make things look even worse.

Can you fix the resizing text box issue on Safari when a new line is inserted? When your question wraps to a newline Safari locks up for a few seconds and it's really annoying. You can test by pasting text too.

> how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

Are you applying the same standards to your own scraper bots?

It has not been negligible for me, and, however you're doing this, there is significant room for improvement.

There have been times when, across about ten minutes of usage, most of which is me typing on iOS Safari, it drained 15% of my battery. There is no functional justification for this beyond poor code quality. (It was on a long conversation FWIW.)

This when I'm logged in, with a paid (Plus) account, connected to a very old email address with a real user profile. That can't be the result of super-clever bot defense measures, because it's merely an inconvenience on desktop. And if you genuinely believe that email has been compromised, why aren't you reaching out the to the account owner, as the account isn't otherwise connected to fraud by your heuristics?

However brilliant the LLM agent it is, I'm seeing a lot of unforced errors regarding how you implement a web interface to it. If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't really register compared to all the bloat I see on other sites.

Chatgpt banned me after I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat.

When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.

I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.

Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?

> we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform

Have you just described the dilemma facing all the content sites used to train LLMs?

Fwiw, I stopped using ChatGPT and went to a competitor because the checks slow down ChatGPT so much that the webapp becomes unusable in anything but a new short chat. CPU usage goes to 100%, you can't type, the entire tab freezes, etc. It's a miserable experience to use and I'm on a relatively new MacBook not some old computer. If you read around it's a very common problem people have been having for a while now.

Its your business and your call. But my opinion is that I wish you would quit offering free services. I'm pretty concerned about the horrible effect your free services are having on education. Yes, AI can be an incredible tool to enhance education. But the reality is that it is decimating children's will to learn anything.

I don't want to blame AI for all the world's problems. And I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But I think you should think really hard about the value of gates. Smart people can build better gates than cash. But right now, cash might be better than nothing. Clearly you have already thought about how to build gates, but I don't think you have spent enough time thinking about who should be gated and why. You should think about gates that have more purpose than just maximizing your profit.

"We want to hook as many people as possible without letting in our competitors" is a pretty crummy thought to use as a public justification.

(Edited for typos.)

Tangential question: are there chatgpt app devs on X? There are a few from Codex team but I couldn’t find guys from “ordinary” chatgpt.

Also if you could pass this over: it takes 5 taps to change thinking effort on ios and none (as in completely hidden) on macos.

If I were to guess it seems that you were trying to lower the token usage :-). Why the effort is only nicely available on web and windows is beyond me

Earnest question: if I was feeling lazy and security-conscious at the same time, would I be better off...

(A) opening chatgpt.com in qubes (but staying logged out, i.e. never creating a chatgpt account)

-or-

(B) creating a freemium chatgpt account

(Obviously, the "best" answer would be something like running a local LLM from an airgapped machine in a concrete bunker :) But that's not what I'm after).

>abuse like bots, scraping

10/10, I've got no notes

Abuse from scraping has long been a serious problem for many, good job!

Hi Nick, the lag is quite bad in the field, honest. In desktop app in this case/datapoint. There was that "halt and catch fire" episode where they spoke about a millisencod threshold of delay that separated usability and non. Solvent hw and fiber connection.

But why block the ui until then? Surely you can just not make any requests until the checks are complete?

I shouldn't be giving ideas to your boss, but I bet he would be interested in making ChatGPT available only by paying customers or free for those whose who gets their eyes scanned by The Orb. Give 30 days of raised limits and we're all set to live in the dystopia he wants.

I always wondered why you even have logged out access. I'm glad I can use ChatGPT in incognito when I want a "clean room" response, but surely that's not the primary use case.

Is user base that never logs in really that significant?

This episode proves they know who you are, even when you're logged out. If they didn't know, they wouldn't let you use the service.

Why send the Turnstile bytecode encrypted ? Surely people savvy enough to abuse the system will find out how to decrypt it, see OP, and it gives the impression that you are trying to hide stuffs you're not proud about.

Because they want to make it as hard as possible to reverse engineer. If they wanted it to be easy, they'd use <input type="checkbox" name="ishuman">I am a human

Why are all these checks still performed on an authenticated, paid user?

> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users

How does this comport with OpenAI's new B2B-first strategy?

> We also keep a very close eye on the user impact

Are paid or logged-in users also penalised?

> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

The lack of self awareness...

> we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

Isn't that how you build your service from the very start? How ironic.

As a free tier user I only get like three queries in now without model quality reduction, so I'd say your bases are covered as far as GPU costs around misuse.

> "abuse like bots, scraping"

You what, mate? Would you please use that on yourselves first? Because it comes off as a GROSS hypocrisy. State of the art hypocrisy.

>> behavioral biometric layer

But this one, especially, takes the cake.

Quite disgusting.

> A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

Are these checks disabled for logged-in, paid users?

I really appreciate the free options, without even needing a login. Wish they would also keep the small free weekly allowance for Codex.

Have you given any thought to what we trade when big tech elects one corporation as the gatekeeper for vast swaths of the Internet?

For what it's worth, I switched to Gemini because of the long ChatGPT load time. Gemini loads as fast as Google Search.

The reason why you did it is clear, why you guys settle down for such a poor implementation is why this thread exists

No, leave it. Surely the mighty OpenAI can deal with the scraping. At least, it seems to think everyone else can

> we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users.

And THANK YOU for that!

Being able to use ChatGPT and Grok without signing in is a big part of why I like those services over Gemini etc.

Hell, dummy Claude won't even let me Sign-In-with-Apple on the Mac desktop, even though it let me Sign-UP-with-Apple on the iPhone! BUT they do support Sign-In-with-Google!!? What in the heavenly hell is this dumbassery

Do you do those checks only for users without accounts or also for those with accounts?

the company that scrapes every until it collapses really needs to protect itself from scraping. Lol.

Kudos for trying

This whole thread was like watching a swarm of ants try and take a grasshopper down

In long threads in chatgpt, it grinds to a halt in both Chrome and Firefox. Please fix

Thanks. I've used ChatGPT a million times and never had any input issues.

> protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping

You do see the irony here?

History will not be kind to you and your ilk. Quit your job.

Hey Nick, I find it concerning this account is. Frayed just to comment on this thread. And never even reply back to any of the real concerns.

Here to hoping this is real person and actually created account out of concern and sharing.

Are you disabling them for paying subscribers?

Then make sure they only target the free tier!

You do not ever trust the client side. Sometimes being simple is good enough. The maximum you can do is put rate limits on the IP address and/or user account. You just do not want some one to use the product at machine speeds.

Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.

> Hi Nick, your software is a horrendous encroachment on users' privacy and its quality is subpar to those of us who know what we're working with. We don't use your product here.

It’s ok, OpenAI is cooked.

Feel bad for anyone who joined OAI in the past 12 months. Their RSU ain’t going to be worth much later this year. IPO is too late.

We really need ZKPs of humanity

No, we really don't. We don't need worldcoin, we don't need papers, please. We just don't.

"Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.

No, it doesn't go places we "do not want it to go". What part of zero knowledge doesn't make sense? How precisely does a free, unlinkable, multi-vendor, open-source cryptographic attestation of recent humanity create something terrible?

It would behoove people to engage with the substance of attestation proposals. It's lazy to state that any verification scheme whatsoever is equivalent to a panopticon, dystopia as thought-terminating cliche.

We really do have the technology now to attest biographical details in such a way that whoever attests to a fact about you can't learn the use to which you put that attestation and in such a way that the person who verifies your attestation can see it's genuine without learning anything about you except that one bit of information you disclose.

And no, such a ZK scheme does not turn instantly into some megacorp extracting monopoly rents from some kind of internet participation toll booth. Why would this outcome be inevitable? We have plenty of examples of fair and open ecosystems. It's just lazy to assert right out of the gate that any attestation scheme is going to be captured.

So, please, can we stop matching every scheme whatsoever for verifying facts as actors as the East German villain in a cold war movie? We're talking about something totally different.

The ZK part isn't the problem. The "attestation of recent humanity" part is. Who attests? What happens when someone can't get attested?

You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.

Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers" which leads to...

We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it this time? Please?

The part where FAANG does usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, masses don't care/understand and we have yet another "sign in with... " that isn't open source nor zero-knowledge in practice and monetizes your every move. And probably at least one of the vendors has massive leak that shows half-assed or even flawed on purpose implementation.

> quickly goes places you do not want it to go.

Which places?

Sure. I'll provide an API to provide mine to your bot for $1 each time.

Protecting your site from bots and scraping is absolutely hilarious considering how you acquired (read: stole) the data you trained your bot on dude.

Just yank that ladder up behind you.

> Just yank that ladder up behind you.

You would be an irresponsible entrepreneur if you didn't. Don't forget your legal obligation to maximise shareholder value.

> I work on Integrity at OpenAI

Irony is truly dead. Show you have integrity by quitting your job

> These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

Isn't this the same behavior used by AI companies to gather training data? Pot, meet kettle.

You’re doing gods work sir, thank you!

This is utter and complete bullshit. Why would "prevent typing" help abuse?

There should be nothing submitted, except maybe anonymous telemetry metrics at that point.

I understand it's not your area, but can you please politely tell your colleagues that the clickbait-type teaser questions from the latest model are absolutely infuriating and are quickly leading to me abandon the platform entirely?

If you'd like, I can write a two-sentence paragraph to send to your colleagues. It contains a special phrase which most colleagues will find difficult to ignore. Would you like me to do that?

Hi Nick, do you believe what you say? You scraped the shit out of everyone

Fake Account

the irony of your statement is hilarious, disappointing, and infuriating.

lol, hypocrites.

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