Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance

AI web crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many developers believe. FOSS devs are fighting back in ingenuous, humorous ways.

Read in full here:

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The ending of the article is hilarious but sad and true in some ways:

But DeVault also issued a public, heartfelt plea for a more direct fix: “Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop.”

From Devault’s personal blog site on a related article:

If you personally work on developing LLMs et al, know this: I will never work with you again, and I will remember which side you picked when the bubble bursts.

No comment haha :smile:

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Ah, that makes a lot of sense … At least now I know why chatbot responses are so bad. :joy:

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I recently blocked AmazonBot (and its IPs) on one of our servers because it was hammering it :021:

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Hahahahahaha :joy: :rofl:

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You got lucky @AstonJ. You ever read the story of the site that got hammered by scrapers from OpenAI? Terrible stuff.

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Yeah I’ve heard so many horror stories. I think in part they do it on purpose, so the websites are taken down so that they can’t later sue them for copyright infringement..