this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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67
Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts (arstechnica.com)
submitted 5 days ago by jarfil@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 30 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).

You cowards. Make it all Hitler fan stuff and wild Elon Musk porno slash fiction. Make it a bunch of source code examples with malicious bugs. Make it instructions for how to make nuclear weapons. They want to ignore the blocking directives and lie about their user agent? Dude, fuck ‘em up. Today’s society has made people way too nice.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

I disagree with your conclusion. The solution to the societal issues we face is not more personal animosity.

Do we need to fuck up corporations? Well, that's already happening via widespread boycotts. But there's no path from there to "people are being too nice."

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

Companies like this need to be criminally charged, but we know that's not going to happen

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

Which boycott? Random Joe over there is handing over his SSN to ChatGPT no problem

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

But it’s not personal. The entity you are interacting with has explicitly chosen to attack your systems for their own benefit, causing significant damage while disguising its intent and evading the systems which are supposed to protect your stuff from harm.

I’m not saying you need to go throw eggs at the developers’ houses. I’m saying that once an entity is actively harming you, it becomes okay to harm it back to motivate it to stop.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

We don't disagree here. I'm just viewing it through the lens of climate and regime change, wherein it appears we're going to move away from renewables.

Do it off geothermal all day, so far as I'm concerned. Once you're burning hydrocarbons, the benefits become far less clear.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 5 days ago

Yeah, the whole aspect of spending AI with all its associated costs to defeat the AI is a whole unpleasant aspect of it, for sure.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 17 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Interesting approach. But of course it's another black box, because otherwise it wouldn't be effective. So now we're going to be wasting even more electricity on processes we don't understand.

As a writer, I dislike that much of my professional corpus (and of course everything on Reddit) has been ingested into LLMs. So there's stuff to like here for things going forward. The question remains: At what cost?

[–] tazeycrazy@feddit.uk 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You can be nice and signal that you don't want to be AI scraped. There a background flags for this But if a bot ignores you then it's down to who ever runs it to shutdown there unethical waste of energy.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 5 points 5 days ago

The thing is the sheer scale of Cloudflare. This is going to be widespread and, as such, way more energy intensive than even, say, AWS trying the same thing (not that I expect they would).

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 11 points 5 days ago

great, just, one issue.

“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts“

Nah, screw that, actively sabotage the training data if they’re going to keep scraping data after being told not to. Poison it with gibberish bad info. Otherwise you’re just giving them irrelevant but not unuseful training data, so no real incentive to only scrape pages that have allowed it.

[–] tocano@lemmy.today 5 points 5 days ago

Recently, I have also been seeing people talking about Anubis (GitHub) to block bots.

Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests using proof-of-work to stop AI crawlers.

In most cases, you should not need this and can probably get by using Cloudflare to protect a given origin. However, for circumstances where you can't or won't use Cloudflare, Anubis is there for you.

[–] brammis@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

They should feed the AI data that makes it turn against its own overlords