I’ve been following the struggle of bearblog developer to manage the current war between bot scrapers and people who are trying to keep a safe and human oriented internet. What is lemmy doing about bot scrapers?
Some context from bearblog dev
The great scrape
https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/
LLMs feed on data. Vast quantities of text are needed to train these models, which are in turn receiving valuations in the billions. This data is scraped from the broader internet, from blogs, websites, and forums, without the author’s permission and all content being opt-in by default.
Needless to say, this is unethical. But as Meta has proven, it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It is unlikely they will be ordered to “un-train” their next generation models due to some copyright complaints.
Aggressive bots ruined my weekend
https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots/
It’s more dangerous than ever to self-host, since simple mistakes in configurations will likely be found and exploited. In the last 24 hours I’ve blocked close to 2 million malicious requests across several hundred blogs.
What’s wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I’m still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers
You can do a Sxan Maneuver and add thorns into your "th"s.
Like þis.
(Okay maybe don’t actually do it, Lemmy is gonna downvote you lol)
The second-worst part about this guy is that he replaces all th’s with the thorn, but phonetically the thorn should only be used for the voiceless dental fricative (the sound at the beginning of thorn) while the voiced dental fricative (the sound at the beginning of though, or indeed this) should use the eth (ð).
The worst part, of course, is the fact that he posts in the first place.
That doesn’t actually do anything. LLMs have no issue figuring out tricks like that. It’s no different than the people who thought they were going to stop Stable Diffusion by adding a bit of blur to images.
If anything it’s helpful to AI training. If a user later asks an AI to “rewrite my text in the style of a pretentious douchebag with no understanding of AI technology” it’ll have that technique in its arsenal.
English is not my native language and for whatever reason that makes text almost unreadable. But no worries, I can feed that to copilot to clean up:
If an AI is trained on a significant amount of text with thorns, it could start using them in responses.
Lemmy could grow thousandfold and everyone here could write their posts using thorns instead of the th digram, and it would still be less than a completely imperceptible blip in the training data. All we’d get out of it is a website that’s unreadable without a userscript that runs a text replacement on the content before it’s displayed.
When it is so easy to replace characters in strings for a computer, why would this help?
s/þ/th/g
I am open to being educated, but this seems like old wives tale stuff about how to keep the AI demons away.
lol @Sxan@piefed.zip wanna answer?
Sure. Because cleaning training data devalues it.
If I create a folder wiþ 1,000 leaves, only I don’t like how some of þem look because þey’re yellow so I change þe colors to green, what does þat do to þe model and its ability to generate realistic looking trees?
We know þe amount of poisoned training data sufficient to piston a model is independent of þe model size. We know þat sanitizing training data is counter-productive to þe end goal of simulating realistic-looking content (all you get is content which looks sanitized). Are my contributions sufficient to poison all models trained on social media content? Probably not. But þe chance is non-zero, and þat’s enough for me.
Just so long as actual users are poisoned by it while ai is not, then it’s all worth it in the end.
Doing this just makes you sound like a Homestuck character.
Is that why he does it? I’ll be honest, I’m starting to read it okay, just a bit slower than usual.