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
I guess this is what the first iteration of the Blackwall looks like.
Gotta say “AI Labyrinth” sounds almost as cool.
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.
“I used the AI to destroy the AI”
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.
We had to kill the internet, to save the internet.
We have to kill the Internet, to save humanity.
This is getting ridiculous. Can someone please ban AI? Or at least regulate it somehow?
The problem is, how? I can set it up on my own computer using open source models and some of my own code. It’s really rough to regulate that.
As for everything, it has good things, and bad things. We need to be careful and use it in a proper way, and the same thing applies to the ones creating this technology
Once a technology or even an idea is there, you can’t really make it go away - ai is here to stay. The generative LLM are just a small part.
Should have called it “Black ICE”.
Definitely falls under the category of a Trap ICE card.
Jokes on them. I’m going to use AI to estimate the value of content, and now I’ll get the kind of content I want, though fake, that they will have to generate.
They used AI to destroy AI
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People complain about AI possibly being unreliable, then actively root for things that are designed to make them unreliable.
I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.
He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”
Which I found scarily insightful.
Oh good.
now I can add digital jihad by hallucinating AI to the list of my existential terrors.
Thank your relative for me.
Not if we go butlerian jihad on them first
lol, I was gonna say a reverse butlerian jihad but i didnt think many people would get the reference :p
Here’s the key distinction:
This only makes AI models unreliable if they ignore “don’t scrape my site” requests. If they respect the requests of the sites they’re profiting from using the data from, then there’s no issue.
People want AI models to not be unreliable, but they also want them to operate with integrity in the first place, and not profit from people’s work who explicitly opt-out their work from training.
I’m a person.
I dont want AI, period.
We cant even handle humans going psycho. Last thing I want is an AI losing its shit due from being overworked producing goblin tentacle porn and going full skynet judgement day.
Got enough on my plate dealing with a semi-sentient olestra stain trying to recreate the third reich, as is.
We cant even handle humans going psycho. Last thing I want is an AI losing its shit due from being overworked producing goblin tentacle porn and going full skynet judgement day.
That is simply not how “AI” models today are structured, and that is entirely a fabrication based on science fiction related media.
The series of matrix multiplication problems that an LLM is, and runs the tokens from a query through does not have the capability to be overworked, to know if it’s been used before (outside of its context window, which itself is just previous stored tokens added to the math problem), to change itself, or to arbitrarily access any system resources.
You must be fun at parties.
- Say something blatantly uninformed on an online forum
- Get corrected on it
- Make reference to how someone is perceived at parties, an entirely different atmosphere from an online forum, and think you made a point
Good job.
- See someone make a comment about a AI going rogue after being forced to produce too much goblin tentacle porn
- Get way to serious over the factual capabilities of a goblin tentacle porn generating AI.
- Act holier than thou over it while being completely oblivious to comedic hyperbole.
Good job.
Whats next? Call me a fool for thinking Olestra stains are capable of sentience and thats not how Olestra works?
This will only make models of bad actors who don’t follow the rules worse quality. You want to sell a good quality AI model trained on real content instead of other misleading AI output? Just follow the rules ;)
Doesn’t sound too bad to me.
Maybe it will learn discretion and what sarcasm are instead of being a front loaded google search of 90% ads and 10% forums. It has no way of knowing if what it’s copy pasting is full of shit.
i mean this is just designed to thwart ai bots that refuse to follow robots.txt rules of people who specifically blocked them.
I’m glad we’re burning the forests even faster in the name of identity politics.
What has this anything to do with identity politics?
Don’t feed the troll
Do you identify as retarded?
Well that was a swing and a miss, back to the dugout with you dumbass.
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
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."
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.
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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.
That’s just BattleBots with a different name.
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.
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…
this is some fucking stupid situation, we somewhat got a faster internet and these bots messing each other are hogging the bandwidth.
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The problem you aren’t recognizing is that, until humans are no longer driven by self preservation, there will always be oppression in any system. They all have and will continue to breakdown. It’s easy to blame capitalism but even socialist systems eventually cave under the weight of greed and power. We are the problem mon frère.
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How can authority not exist? That’s staggeringly broad
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Not who you responded to but yeah I want to hear a drug fuelled rant I don’t even care what topic
Not the one you responded to but how about the tiredness-fuelled rant that I replied to the other person with.
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This is the most boring drug fuelled rant I’ve heard in my life
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I… Don’t think I’ve heard anyone claim authority shouldn’t exist.
So here’s a little bit of lemmy lore for you. You’re instance lemmy.ml is considered to be a tankie instance by some users. lemmy.dbzer0.com is an anarchist instance. The user you responded to probably made a generalisation based on this and assumed you were familiar with anarchist/communist/socialist/leftist discourse. From this comment I assume they were wrong.
So on behalf of no-one but myself: Hello! Welcome to Anarchism! The belief that authority should not exist. This belief comes from a lot of different places and wears a lot of different faces. Most short explanations aren’t sufficient and long explanation bore most. If you don’t mind a little learning here is a link: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1 and another one https://crimethinc.com/2016/09/28/feature-the-secret-is-to-begin-getting-started-further-resources-frequently-asked-questions#faq or if you like videos: https://youtu.be/lrTzjaXskUU.
Also a little bit about authority: people use authority to mean many things (this is even bought up in the video I linked above). But as far as anarchists are concerned (in general (no specific statement can be made about a group so vast)) authority is the act of coercing people to follow orders or commit involuntary acts. You’re boss can coerce you to neglect your health by threatening to fire you. Your government can force you to obey gender roles by threatening to jail you. A rich person can make you do whatever demeaning thing they want by dangling money in front of you (for reference see mrbeast) because otherwise your landlord will kick you out. This is authority and it is wrong. Those in authority can make mistakes, become greedy and start to think they have the power to do whatever they want (mostly because they can). This leads to suffering. My meaning of life is to minimise suffering. Anarchy is the belief that no-one should hold power over others. That all leadership should be scrutinised. It rejects blind faith in single people and encourages to think for yourself so no-one can do you wrong. And if you can’t be bothered, it encourages you to find people who genuinely care about you and let them stand up for you.
Thanks, I don’t really care for generalizing instances and didn’t really have a choice when I made my account.
But also your definition is impossibly broad as you well and I’m pretty sure not the general consensus. The video doesn’t define it as such either.
For one thing, by your definition we can have absolutely no meaningful human relationships. I can explain this more later when I have time if you don’t see what I mean
My explanation of authority wasn’t meant as a definition but rather a brief summarisation of a complex concept, Andrew does a better job actually explaining it. Like pointing out that Authority is confused with a lot of different concepts like respect or influence. Which I’m starting to suspect is happening here. meaningful human relationships are based on mutual respect. This is not authority as it is voluntary, reciprocated and revoked as soon as the other party steps over the line. This is what I believe is the basis of society and what we need to return to in order to live a truly free life. In modern society in most interactions respect has been replaced with authority. People in positions of power even use them synonymously.
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That’s not really relevant here. This is more of a “genie is out of the bottle and now we have to learn how to deal with it situation”. The idea and technology of bots and AI training already exists. There’s no socioeconomic system that is going to magically make that go away.
I think the point you’re missing is that without the monetary incentive that arises under capitalism, there would be very little drive for anyone to build these wasteful AI systems. It’s difficult to imagine a group of people voluntarily amassing and then using the resources necessary for “AI” absent the desire to cash in on their investment. So you’re correct that an alternative economic system won’t “magically” make LLMs go away. I think it unlikely, however, that such wasteful nonsense would be used on any meaningful scale absent the perverse incentives of capitalism.
It’s difficult to imagine a group of people voluntarily amassing and then using the resources necessary for “AI” absent the desire to cash in on their investment.
I mean Dmitry Pospelov was arguing for AI control in the Soviet Union clear back in the 70s.
Just another way the state capitalist soviet union was closer to capitalism than socialism.
It is called regulation in sane parts of the world.
Sadly, those areas seem to be diminishing rapidly until more people enter the Find Out phase.
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everyone remembers tomogatchi, they were like a digital houseplant.
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You can still buy new ones. Take a nap.
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the used market
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Lost on Lemmy?
He is not wrong. Unless people start to take steps , the dependency of tech will be used to chain most of us. Granted, these chains will be the kindest and gentlest chains seen in a long time.
Social revolution lives on in decentralized services, like this; the true battles will be later though. This year is a mild warm up. I can’t imagine the challenges that await many
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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.
Cloudflare offers that too, but you can’t always tell
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.
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
Next step is an AI that detects AI labyrinth.
It gets trained on labyrinths generated by another AI.
So you have an AI generating labyrinths to train an AI to detect labyrinths which are generated by another AI so that your original AI crawler doesn’t get lost.
It’s gonna be AI all the way down.
All the while each AI costs more power than a million human beings to run, and the world burns down around us.
This is the great filter.
Why isn’t there detectable life out there? They all do the same thing we’re doing. Undone by greed.
I haven’t heard of someone refer to the great filter of intelligent life for a while. Good post.
The same way they justify cutting benefits for the disabled to balance budgets instead of putting taxes on the rich or just not giving them bailouts, they will justify cutting power to you before a data centre that’s 10 corporate AIs all fighting each other, unless we as a people stand up and actually demand change.
In Texas 80% of our water usage is corporate. But when the lakes are low during a drought they tell homeowners to reduce water the grass. Nobody tells the corporations to throw away less water.
AI will be allowed to use as much energy as it wants. It will even remind people to turn off the lights in a room not being occupied while wasting energy to monitor everyone’s power usage.
Vote Blue No Matter Who
Any Democrat is Better than Any Republican
Plenty of Democrats are voting to put trump nominees in office, plenty are voting on partisan spending bills. The CR vote should tip you off that any democrat is not better than any republican… half of them are complicit too. 10 Senate Dems just financed this authoritarian takeover.
Not a single Democrat voted to confirm Hegseth and 3 Republicans also didnt but he still got confirmed.
Every single Democrat was present and voted no for the Budget which passed the House and it still passed.
Even if 10 dems voted not to shutdown government and enter congressional recess, the CR only exists because Republicans wrote it and won’t compromise.
Any Democrat is Better than Any Republican.
Scheumer rubberstamped autocracy by not filibustering the CR. I think anyone who protects the constitution and their constituents is better than someone who doesn’t. Not that any repuclicans fit the bill, but its not like we can just trust any old democrat. Look at Gavin Newsome sliding to the right to maintain power. That the kinda dems we want?
This is why we need a centrists political party. Solutions shouldn’t be a false dichotomy.
And we shouldn’t downvote people into oblivion. Take my charitable upvote.
That will require reform of campaign finance laws and progressive reform for elections, both of which are highly partisan issues.
I bet there are corporations that want regulatory stability over political football. If someone could figure out how to tap that with Super PACs they could capture funding. Probably easier to do in local elections where on party or another has failed to put up a candidate for a judge.
I see one party races in Texas for justice of the peace and for judges. The Dems have no viable candidates in some jurisdictions because no one wants a democrat or to be labeled as one. But maybe a centrist could brand themselves as the anti democratic alternative to republicans.
No
Then you will get Republicans
Blue no matter who is precisely how we got Trump.
In my country blue is conservatives… But I agree with the sentiment! It worked for California, it can work for your whole country, let the Dems stop fearing they’ll lose elections, give them comfortable margins and then massively support progressives who can bring in the good stuff, they won’t have a chance if the party core thinks the very future of elections is on the line, but if they think they’ll likely win anyway, you might just be able to push through a progressive candidate and end the Neoliberal decay.
To be fair, California is kind of dysfunctional and constantly trips over its own regulations when trying to get anything built. For instance, needing excessive environmental impact review for things like trains that will obviously help the environment, or limiting ferry boats crossing the bay to protect the environment even though it likely results in more people driving instead.
You need a strong and agile state. This dysfunction often stems from complexities introduced by corporate interests during the legislative process.
It’s so rare to get positive reinforcement like this, these days. Thank you.
LLMs tend to be really bad at detecting AI generated content. I can’t imagine specialized models are much better. For the crawler, it’s also exponentially more expensive and more human work, and must be replicated for every crawler since they’re so freaking secretive.
I think the hosts win here.
Yeah that’s how we achieve singularity.
