Put something in robots.txt that isn’t supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.
Imperfect, but can’t think of a better solution.
Good old honeytrap. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s doable.
Have a honeytrap page somewhere in your website. Make sure that legit users won’t access it. Disallow crawling the honeytrap page through robots.txt.
Then if some crawler still accesses it, you could record+ban it as you said… or you could be even nastier and let it do so. Fill the honeytrap page with poison - nonsensical text that would look like something that humans would write.
I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it’s still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.
Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.
I’d love to see something similar with robots.
Yup, it’s the same approach as email spam traps. Except the naughty list, but… holy fuck a shareable bot IP list is an amazing addition, it would increase the damage to those web crawling businesses.
robots.txt is purely textual; you can’t run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn’t intend to follow robots.txt wouldn’t query it.
If it doesn’t get queried that’s the fault of the webscraper. You don’t need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:
here-there-be-dragons.html
Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn’t pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.
Nice idea! Better use
/dev/urandom
through, as that is non blocking. See here.
I actually love the data-poisoning approach. I think that sort of strategy is going to be an unfortunately necessary part of the future of the web.
Well the trump era has shown that ignoring social contracts and straight up crime are only met with profit and slavish devotion from a huge community of dipshits. So. Y’know.
As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that’s why things seem so much worse now.
It’s abuse, plain and simple.
Governments could do something about it, if they weren’t overwhelmed by bullshit from bullshit generators instead and lead by people driven by their personal wealth.
We need laws mandating respect of
robots.txt
. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuffAI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.
It’s a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt
Also, by the way, violating a basic social contract to not work towards triggering an intelligence explosion that will likely replace all biological life on Earth with computronium, but who’s counting? :)
Ah, AI doesn’t pose as danger in that way. It’s danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.
Your worry at least has possible solutions, such as a global VAT funding UBI.
Yeah I’m not for UBI that much, and don’t see anyone working towards global VAT. I was comparing that worry about AI that is gonna destroy humanity is not possible, it’s just scifi.
Seven years ago I would have told you that GPT-4 was sci fi, and I expect you would have said the same, as would have most every AI researcher. The deep learning revolution came as a shock to most. We don’t know when the next breakthrough will be towards agentification, but given the funding now, we should expect soon. Anyways, if you’re ever interested to learn more about unsolved fundamental AI safety problems, the book “Human Compatible” by Stewart Russell is excellent. Also “Uncontrollable” by Darren McKee just came out (I haven’t read it yet) and is said to be a great introduction to the bigger fundamental risks. A lot to think about; just saying I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Cheers.
No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.
if exists("/robots.txt"): no it fucking doesn't
Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don’t waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It’s there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.
hmm, i though websites just blocked crawler traffic directly? I know one site in particular has rules about it, and will even go so far as to ban you permanently if you continually ignore them.
Detecting crawlers can be easier said than done 🙁
i mean yeah, but at a certain point you just have to accept that it’s going to be crawled. The obviously negligent ones are easy to block.
TIL that robots.txt is a thing
good. robots.txt was always a bad idea