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Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [+] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can specifically target crawlers that ignore robots.txt, which will catch practically every LLM scraper.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Well, yeah, but obeying robots.txt is only a courtesy in the first place, so you can't guarantee it'll catch only LLM-related crawlers and no others, although it may lower the false positive rate.

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