So AI taxes power, water for cooling, and other natural resources to be ramped up and used. Now this creates a second wasteful AI to do the same and create an endless loop so that the first AI just keeps spinning its wheels and wasting resources until discovered. The idea makes sense from a pure “stop unauthorized crawling” perspective, but damn we just have no solutions that don’t accelerate climate impact. This planet is just going to turn into an oven to cook us.
“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense,” Cloudflare explains. “Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots.”
It sounds like there may be a plan to block known bots once they have used this tool to identify them. Over time this would reduce the amount of AI slop they need to generate for the AI trap, since bots already fingerprinted would not be served it. Since AI generators are expensive to run, it would be in Cloudflare’s interests to do this. So while your concern is well placed, in this particular case there may be a surge of energy and water usage at first that tails off once more bots are fingerprinted.
The problem being they’re now attempting anti-fingerprinting tactics. A lot of the AI crawlers used to identify themselves as Amazon/openAI/etc. And aren’t anymore because they were being blocked. Now they’re coming from random IPs with random/obfuscated agent ids.
There are solutions. I’ve just read (diagonally) a paper on attacks on Kademlia. The solutions would be similar to what’s recommended there. The problems are in appearances different, but stem from no admission control for the network.
All this tomfoolery about “oh horror, how do we solve this” is because bot farms and recommendation systems and ad networks have proven very convenient and profitable, nobody wants to scratch that ecosystem in favor of f2f services. So they want to remove one side of the coin, but leave the other.
So AI taxes power, water for cooling, and other natural resources to be ramped up and used. Now this creates a second wasteful AI to do the same and create an endless loop so that the first AI just keeps spinning its wheels and wasting resources until discovered. The idea makes sense from a pure “stop unauthorized crawling” perspective, but damn we just have no solutions that don’t accelerate climate impact. This planet is just going to turn into an oven to cook us.
It sounds like there may be a plan to block known bots once they have used this tool to identify them. Over time this would reduce the amount of AI slop they need to generate for the AI trap, since bots already fingerprinted would not be served it. Since AI generators are expensive to run, it would be in Cloudflare’s interests to do this. So while your concern is well placed, in this particular case there may be a surge of energy and water usage at first that tails off once more bots are fingerprinted.
Looking for porn me with red eyes swearing at the screen.
…real.
‘Four links deep’
HEY NOW! Sometimes stuff just gets interesting!
‘Into a maze of AI-Generated Nonsense.’
And sometimes that interesting is porn related!
The problem being they’re now attempting anti-fingerprinting tactics. A lot of the AI crawlers used to identify themselves as Amazon/openAI/etc. And aren’t anymore because they were being blocked. Now they’re coming from random IPs with random/obfuscated agent ids.
This is a legal problem not a technological one.
It’s definitely an arms race. One other outcome is that it gets too expensive to be cost effective and slows down that way.
There are solutions. I’ve just read (diagonally) a paper on attacks on Kademlia. The solutions would be similar to what’s recommended there. The problems are in appearances different, but stem from no admission control for the network.
All this tomfoolery about “oh horror, how do we solve this” is because bot farms and recommendation systems and ad networks have proven very convenient and profitable, nobody wants to scratch that ecosystem in favor of f2f services. So they want to remove one side of the coin, but leave the other.
Oooh, that sounds like an interesting read. Do you happen to have the DOI?
I think this is it - https://eudl.eu/doi/10.1145/1460877.1460907 .
Thank you for taking the time!