Testing out a theory with ChatGPT there might be a way, albeit clunky, to detect AI. I asked ChatGPT a simple math question then told it to disregard the rest of the message, then I asked it if it was AI. It answered the math question and told me it was ai. Now a bot probably won’t admit to being AI but it might be foolish enough to consider instruction that you explicitly told it not to follow.

Or you might simply be able to waste its resources by asking it to do something computationally difficult that most people would just reject outright.

Of course all of this could just result in making AI even harder to detect once it learns these tricks. 😬

Any idea what the point of these are then? Sounds like its reporting a fake bug.

AI scrapers are a massive issue for Lemmy instances. I’m gonna try some things in this article because there are enough of them identifying themselves with user agents that I didn’t even think of the ones lying about it.

I guess a bonus (?) is that with 1000 Lemmy instances, the bots get the Lemmy content 1000 times so our input has 1000 times the weighting of reddit.

to me, ai is a bit like bucket of water if you replace the water with “information”. Its a tool and it cant do anything on its own, you could make a program and instruct it to do something but it would work just as chaotically as when you generate stuff with ai. It annoys me so much to see so many(people in general) think that what they call ai is in anyway capable of independent action. It just does what you tell it to do and it does it based on how it has been trained, which is also why relying on ai trained by someone you shouldnt trust is bad idea.

How can you outlaw something a company in another conhtinent is doing? And specially when they are becoming better as disguising themselves as normal traffic? What will happen is that politicians will see this as another reason to push for everyone having their ID associated with their Internet traffic.

Processed lawfully, fairly and transparently.
Collected only for specific legitimate purposes.
Adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary.
Accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.
Stored only as long as is necessary.
Processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security.

If the data subject has given their consent;
To meet contractual obligations;
To comply with legal obligations;
To protect the data subject’s vital interests;
For tasks in the public interest; and
For the legitimate interests of the organisation.

The right to be informed;
The right of access;
The right to rectification;
The right to erasure;
The right to restrict processing;
The right to data portability;
The right to object; and
Rights concerning automated decision-making and profiling.

Consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous.
A request for consent must be intelligible and in clear, plain language.
Silence, pre-ticked boxes and inactivity will no longer suffice as consent.
Consent can be withdrawn at any time.
Consent for online services from a child is only valid with parental authorisation.
Organisations must be able to evidence consent.

Appropriate safeguards should be integrated into the processing.
Data protection must be considered at the design stage of any new process, system or technology.
A DPIA (data protection impact assessment) is an integral part of privacy by design.

When personal data is collected directly from data subjects, data controllers must provide a privacy notice at the time of collection.
When personal data is not obtained directly from data subjects, data controllers must provide a privacy notice without undue delay, and within a month. This must be done the first time they communicate with the data subject.
For all processing activities, data controllers must decide how the data subjects will be informed, and design privacy notices accordingly. Notices can be issued in stages.
Privacy notices must be provided to data subjects in a concise, transparent and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language.

Where the EU has designated a country as providing an adequate level of data protection;
Through standard contractual clauses or binding corporate rules; or
By complying with an app

This is the first I’ve heard about Brazil in this type of cyber attack. Is it re-routed traffic going there or are there a large number of Brazilian bot farms now?

There is no technical solution that will stop corporations with deep pockets in a capitalist society

what would be the solution?

Simple, not allowing anonymous activity. If everything was required to be crypto-graphically signed in such a way that it was tied to a known entity then this could be directly addressed. It’s essentially the same problem that e-mail has with SPAM and not allowing anonymous traffic would mostly solve that problem as well.

Of course many internet users would (rightfully) fight that solution tooth and nail.

take the resources from them so they don’t have them anymore. infiltrating the teams that do this and exposing or sabotaging the effort. literally fighting back, possibly in ways that involve giving the CEO’s and prominent investors a free trip to an old coal mine.

short of that…

AI will come up there to abuse it as well

.

If you get something like 156.67.234.6, then 7, then 56 etc just block 156.67.0.0/24

There are residential IP providers that provide services to scrapers, etc. that involves them having thousands of IPs available from the same IP ranges as real users. They route traffic through these IPs via malware, hacked routers, “free” VPN clients, etc. If you block the IP range for one of these addresses you’ll also block real users.

nepenthe

It’s a Markov-chain-based text generator which could be difficult for people to implement on repos depending upon how they’re hosting them. Regardless, any sensibly-built crawler will have rate limits. This means that although Nepenthe is an interesting thought exercise, it’s only going to do anything to things knocked together by people who haven’t thought about it, not the Big Big companies with the real resources who are likely having the biggest impact.

Takes more effort and results in a static snapshot without being able to track the evolution of the project. (disclaimer: I don’t work with ai, but I’d bet this is the reason and also I don’t intend to defend those scraping twatwaffles in any way, but to offer a possible explanation)

Because that would cost you money, so just “abusing” someone else’s infrastructure is much cheaper.

Too many people overestimate the actual capabilities of these companies.

I really do not like saying this because it lacks a lot of nuance, but 90% of programmers are not skilled in their profession. This is not to say they are stupid (though they likely are, see cat-v/harmful) but they do not care about efficiency nor gracefulness - as long as the job gets done.

You assume they are using source control (which is unironically unlikely), you assume they know that they can run a server locally (which I pray they do), and you assume their deadlines allow them to think about actual solutions to problems (which they probably don’t)

Yes, they get paid a lot of money. But this does not say much about skill in an age of apathy and lawlessness

They’re stealing peoples data to begin with, they don’t give a fuck at all.

Thanks for hosting your instances. I use them often and they’re really well maintained

Last I checked, cloudflare requires the user to have JavaScript and cookies enabled. My institution doesn’t want to require those because it would likely impact legitimate users as well as bots.