Imagine how much power is wasted on this unfortunate necessity.
Now imagine how much power will be wasted circumventing it.
Fucking clown world we live in
On on hand, yes. On the other…imagine frustration of management of companies making and selling AI services. This is such a sweet thing to imagine.
deleted by creator
I…uh…frick.
I just want to keep using uncensored AI that answers my questions. Why is this a good thing?
Because it only harms bots that ignore the “no crawl” directive, so your AI remains uncensored.
Good I ignore that too. I want a world where information is shared. I can get behind the
Get behind the what?
Perhaps an AI crawler crashed Melvin’s machine halfway through the reply, denying that information to everyone else!
That’s not what the
no followcommand meansdon’t worry, information is still shared. but with people. not with capitalist pigs
Capitalist pigs are paying media to generate AI hatred to help them convince you people to get behind laws that all limit info sharing under the guise of IP and copyright
Because it’s not AI, it’s LLMs, and all LLMs do is guess what word most likely comes next in a sentence. That’s why they are terrible at answering questions and do things like suggest adding glue to the cheese on your pizza because somewhere in the training data some idiot said that.
The training data for LLMs come from the internet, and the internet is full of idiots.
LLM is a subset of AI
That’s what I do too with less accuracy and knowledge. I don’t get why I have to hate this. Feels like a bunch of cavemen telling me to hate fire because it might burn the food
Because we have better methods that are easier, cheaper, and less damaging to the environment. They are solving nothing and wasting a fuckton of resources to do so.
It’s like telling cavemen they don’t need fire because you can mount an expedition to the nearest valcanoe to cook food without the need for fuel then bring it back to them.
The best case scenario is the LLM tells you information that is already available on the internet, but 50% of the time it just makes shit up.
Wasteful?
Energy production is an issue. Using that energy isn’t. LLMs are a better use of energy than most of the useless shit we produce everyday.
Did the LLMs tell you that? It’s not hard to look up on your own:
Data centers, in particular, are responsible for an estimated 2% of electricity use in the U.S., consuming up to 50 times more energy than an average commercial building, and that number is only trending up as increasingly popular large language models (LLMs) become connected to data centers and eat up huge amounts of data. Based on current datacenter investment trends,LLMs could emit the equivalent of five billion U.S. cross-country flights in one year.
Far more than straightforward search engines that have the exact same information and don’t make shit up half the time.
From the article it seems like they don’t generate a new labyrinth for every single time: Rather than creating this content on-demand (which could impact performance), we implemented a pre-generation pipeline that sanitizes the content to prevent any XSS vulnerabilities, and stores it in R2 for faster retrieval."
That’s just BattleBots with a different name.
You’re not wrong.
Ok, I now need a screensaver that I can tie to a cloudflare instance that visualizes the generated “maze” and a bot’s attempts to get out.
You probably just should let an AI generate that.
They should program the actions and reactions of each system to actual battle bots and then televise the event for our entertainment.
Then get bored when it devolves into a wedge meta.
Somehow one of them still invents Tombstone.
Putting a chopped down lawnmower blade in front of a thing, and having it spin at harddrive speeds is honestly kinda terrifying…
No, it is far less environmentally friendly than rc bots made of metal, plastic, and electronics full of nasty little things like batteries blasting, sawing, burning and smashing one another to pieces.
this is some fucking stupid situation, we somewhat got a faster internet and these bots messing each other are hogging the bandwidth.
Especially since the solution I cooked up for my site works just fine and took a lot less work. This is simply to identify the incoming requests from these damn bots – which is not difficult, since they ignore all directives and sanity and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second, that makes 'em easy to spot – and simply IP ban them. This is considerably simpler, and doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant powered AI to combat the opposition’s nuclear plant powered AI.
In fact, anybody who doesn’t exhibit a sane crawl rate gets blocked from my site automatically. For a while, most of them were coming from Russian IP address zones for some reason. These days Amazon is the worst offender, I guess their Rufus AI or whatever the fuck it is tries to pester other retail sites to “learn” about products rather than sticking to its own domain.
Fuck 'em. Route those motherfuckers right to /dev/null.
and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second
Your solution would do nothing to stop the crawlers that are operating 10ish rps. There’s ones out there operating at a mere 2rps but when multiple companies are doing it at the same time 24x7x365 it adds up.
Some incredibly talented people have been battling this since last year and your solution has been tried multiple times. It’s not effective in all instances and can require a LOT of manual intervention and SysAdmin time.
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
Yep. After you ban all the easy to spot ones you’re still left with far too many hard to ID bots. At least if your site is popular and large.
It’s worked alright for me. Your mileage may vary.
If someone is scraping my site at a low crawl rate I honestly don’t care so long as it doesn’t impact my performance for everyone else. If I hosted anything that was not just public knowledge or copy regurgitated verbatim from the bumf provided by the vendors of the brands I sell, I might oppose to it ideologically. But I don’t. So I don’t.
If parallel crawling from multiple organizations legitimately becomes a concern for us I will have to get more creative. But thus far it hasn’t, and honestly just wholesale blocking Amazon from our shit instantly solved 90% of the problem.
Geez, that’s a lot of requests!
It sure is. Needless to say, I noticed it happening.
the only problem with that solution being applied to generic websites is schools and institutions can have many legitimate users from one IP address and many sites don’t want a chance to accidentally block one.
This is fair in those applications. I only run an ecommerce web site, though, so that doesn’t come into play.
Cloudflare offers that too, but you can’t always tell
It’s what I’ve been saying about technology for the past decade or two … we’ve hit an upper limit to our technological development … that limit is on individual human greed where small groups of people or massively wealthy people hinder or delay any further development because they’re always trying to find ways to make money off it, prevent others from making money off it, monopolize an area or section of society … capitalism is literally our world’s bottleneck and it’s being choked off by an oddly shaped gold bar at this point.
Lol website traffic accounts for like 1% of bandwidth budget. 1 netflix movie is like 20k web pages.
Not exactly how I expected the AI wars to go, but I guess since we’re in a cyberpunk world, we take what we get
So the web is a corporate war zone now and you can choose feudal protection or being attacked from all sides. What a time to be alive.
There is also the corpo verified id route. In order to avoid the onslaught of AI bots and all that comes with them you’ll need to sacrifice freedom, anonymity, and privacy like a good little peasant to prove you aren’t a bot… and so will everyone else. You’ll likely be forced to deal with whatever AI bots are forced upon you while within the walls but better an enemy you know I guess?
Surprised at the level of negativity here. Having had my sites repeatedly DDOSed offline by Claudebot and others scraping the same damned thing over and over again, thousands of times a second, I welcome any measures to help.
I think the negativity is around the unfortunate fact that solutions like this shouldn’t be necessary.
thousands of times a second
Modify your Nginx (or whatever web server you use) config to rate limit requests to dynamic pages, and cache them. For Nginx, you’d use either fastcgi_cache or proxy_cache depending on how the site is configured. Even if the pages change a lot, a cache with a short TTL (say 1 minute) can still help reduce load quite a bit while not letting them get too outdated.
Static content (and cached content) shouldn’t cause issues even if requested thousands of times per second. Following best practices like pre-compressing content using gzip, Brotli, and zstd helps a lot, too :)
Of course, this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones. Those are often much larger and need different protection - often some protection on the network or load balancer before it even hits the server.
Already done, along with a bunch of other stuff including cloudflare WAF and rate limiting rules.
I am still annoyed that it took me over a day’ of my life to finally (so far) restrict these things. And several other days to offload the problem to Cloudflare pages for sites that I previous self hosted but my rural link couldn’t support.
this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones.
And I don’t think these high volume AI scrapes are unintentional DDOS attacks. I consider them entirely intentional. Not deliberrately malicious, but negligent to the point of criminality. (Especially in requesting the same pages again so frequently, and all of them ignoring robots.txt)
So the world is now wasting energy and resources to generate AI content in order to combat AI crawlers, by making them waste more energy and resources. Great! 👍
The energy cost of inference is overstated. Small models, or “sparse” models like Deepseek are not expensive to run. Training is a one-time cost that still pales in comparison to, like, making aluminum.
Doubly so once inference goes more on-device.
Basically, only Altman and his tech bro acolytes want AI to be cost prohibitive so he can have a monopoly. Also, he’s full of shit, and everyone in the industry knows it.
AI as it’s implemented has plenty of enshittification, but the energy cost is kinda a red herring.
I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”
Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?
Because you are coming from the perspective of a reasonable person
These people are billionaires who expect to get everything for free. Rules are for the plebs, just take it already
That’s what they are saying though. These shouldn’t be thought of as “rules”, they are suggestions near universally designed to point you to the most relevant content. Ignoring them isn’t “stealing something not meant to be captured”, it’s wasting time and resources of your own infra on something very likely to be useless to you.
Because it takes work to obey the rules, and you get less data for it. The theoretical competitor could get more ignoring those and get some vague advantage for it.
I’d not be surprised if the crawlers they used were bare-basic utilities set up to just grab everything without worrying about rules and the like.
They want everything, does it exist, but it’s not in their dataset? Then they want it.
They want their ai to answer any question you could possibly ask it. Filtering out what is and isn’t useful doesn’t achieve that
Generating content with AI to throw off crawlers. I dread to think of the resources we’re wasting on this utter insanity now, but hey who the fuck cares as long as the line keeps going up for these leeches.
And soon, the already AI-flooded net will be filled with so much nonsense that it becomes impossible for anyone to get some real work done. Sigh.
Some of us are only here to crank hog.
AROOO!
I guess this is what the first iteration of the Blackwall looks like.
Gotta say “AI Labyrinth” sounds almost as cool.
“I used the AI to destroy the AI”
We had to kill the internet, to save the internet.
We have to kill the Internet, to save humanity.
And consumed the power output of a medium country to do it.
Yeah, great job! 👍
We truly are getting dumber as a species. We’re facing climate change but running some of the most power hungry processers in the world to spit out cooking recipes and homework answers for millions of people. All to better collect their data to sell products to them that will distract them from the climate disaster our corporations have caused. It’s really fun to watch if it wasn’t so sad.
I’m imagining a sci-fi spin on this where AI generators are used to keep AI crawlers in a loop, and they accidentally end up creating some unique AI culture or relationship in the process.
Considering how many false positives Cloudflare serves I see nothing but misery coming from this.
In terms of Lemmy instances, if your instance is behind cloudflare and you turn on AI protection, federation breaks. So their tools are not very helpful for fighting the AI scraping.
Lol I work in healthcare and Cloudflare regularly blocks incoming electronic orders because the clinical notes “resemble” SQL injection. Nurses type all sorts of random stuff in their notes so there’s no managing that. Drives me insane!
So we’re burning fossil fuels and destroying the planet so bots can try to deceive one another on the Internet in pursuit of our personal data. I feel like dystopian cyberpunk predictions didn’t fully understand how fucking stupid we are…
They probably knew, but the truth is just boring and it’s funner to dramatize things, haha.
