- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.
Registration bypass: https://archive.is/3tEl0
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From the description, it sounds like this would only have limited effect and only short lived until guardrails are implemented in crawlers.
Probably so. It’s always going to be an arms race, just like with malware.
I mean… not really. This isn’t even a defence. Any web crawler worth its salt will just stop after a while. And they do so for literally decades already
Indeed. And any modern AI training system is going to be extensively curating any training data that ends up being fed into the AI, probably processing it through other AIs to generate synthetic data from it. The days of early ChatGPT where LLMs were trained by just dumping giant piles of random text on them and hoping it’ll figure it out somehow are long past.
This reminds me of Nightshade, the supposed anti-art-AI technique that could be defeated by resizing the image (which all art AI training systems do as a matter of course). It may make people “feel better” but it’s not going to have any real impact on anything.
The typical web crawler doesn’t appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too.
So it has nothing to do with “AI training” in the usual sense.
It also has nothing to do with real web crawlers. Maybe the first crawlers when the web was a couple million pages were that dumb, but that’s ancient history.
It does, because it is poisoning AI training data.
I think the point is it doesn’t specifically target “AI trainers” but web crawlers, which are used by more then just A.I. trainer, for example search engines.
Actually, it does specifically target AI trainers, as it poisons their training data. These webcrawlers are just a means to an end.
It affects them, yes, but it doesn’t only affect them. It’s just a poison in the well tactic that can affect them. but because it isn’t specific even more companies will work to “fix it”. Also while it can waste resources, it doesn’t stop A.I. training in most cases or render them incompetent.
For example if I add rat poison to all the local water ways, it would get rid of the pigeon problem, so it targets pigeons?
The first part of what you said, contradicts itself, and the second part of what you said is a terrible metaphor. Especially considering that these web crawlers that crawl for AI training data only target that. And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.
So, it’s more like putting a very specific rat poison in the waterways that is only poisonous to rats.
It seems like you don’t understand how this works.
And this specifically target AI training web crawlers.
There’s no way to distinguish between an AI training crawler and any other crawler. Per https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ :
“This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.”
Emphasis mine. Even the person who coded this thing knows that it can’t tell what a given crawler’s purpose is. They’re just willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in this case, and mess with legitimate crawlers in order to bog down the ones gathering data for LLM training.
(In general, there is no way to tell for certain what is requesting a webpage. The User-Agent header that (usually) arrives with an HTTP(S) request isn’t regulated and can contain any arbitrary string. Crawlers habitually claim to be old versions of Firefox, and there isn’t much the server can do to identify what they actually are.)
From reading the article it just seems it targets web crawlers, by having a infinitely looping url. How does it target A.I. training webcrawls specifically?
