Dr. Andy Farnell Explains Why the Slop Industry is Like Trespassers and Thieves
Two weeks ago: Biggest "AI Companies" (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft) Borrowed (Additional Debt) About $100,000,000,000 in a Year
About seven hours ago Dr. Andy Farnell released an interesting new article about robots.txt files and how raiders that wear "AI" (slop) on their sleeve basically violate the rules of the web (and Net) to engage in mass plagiarism.
Quoting Andy:
It is common for "AI" training crawlers to ignore website preferences and plunder content. There is no recourse to any internet police or authority. Crawler bots are destroying small websites while stealing content to enrich giant corporations. Such computer intrusion and theft requires robust and novel responses since security measures cannot reasonably distinguish legitimate visitors from burglars.It's become common to lay down "digital poison" and booby traps to fend off these devouring interlopers.
In most jurisdictions, for physical intruder deterrence and animal control (bots might well be considered nuisance animals), it's okay to set up hazards at the boundary of a property if prominent warning signs are displayed.
Defences cannot be hidden, elaborate, cruel and unusual. Anti-climb spikes on top of your fence are visible and commonplace enough, whereas it's probably not reasonable and proportionate to impale Amazon delivery drivers on the sharpened bamboo sticks of a Viet Cong punji pit because they strayed off the path at your north London flat.
On the other hand, one would not reasonably make rat poison smell and taste disagreeable to rats in order to 'humanely' warn them. Since the invader is now presumed artificially "intelligent" and capable of "machine learning" they need memorable stimuli to learn from. To the extent they are capable of reasoning, learning and simulating "fear" (caution), bots must expect to 'fear' entering a digital property by themselves experiencing or seeing other bots meet with extremely negative outcomes. Picture a row of bot "heads on spikes" adorning the entrance to your website.
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