"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

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

  • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    9·
    7 days ago

    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

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      3·
      7 days ago

      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.