Website operators are being asked to feed LLM crawlers poisoned data by a project called Poison Fountain.
The project page links to URLs which provide a practically endless stream of poisoned training data. They have determined that this approach is very effective at ultimately sabotaging the quality and accuracy of AI which has been trained on it.
Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.
The page also gives suggestions on how to put the provided resources to use.
Seems like a bad take from my POV, as someone who uses and has made money using LLMs I feel is not ok to poison them, I wouldn’t feel ok with myself getting something for free and even gain money with and at the same time be poisoning it so my take will be: you can always block crawlers in your nginx.conf with some extra steps, you can even use an LLM to do it for you and improve to block all major crawlers. IMHO if it’s public data is even public por crawlers is up to you if you set up a block for these on your behalf.
It would not be fair to prevent ai from violating every single copyright on the earth? That is a novel take.
Especially as most do not use ai but companies are trying to force them to, to ultimately replace half the workforce and send the economy into a doom spiral.
What about the following take: LLMs are an abomination that consumes enormous masses of resources for… well… really nothing besides being a tool to further enshittify the Internet and the world as a whole, being a tool for making it easy creating ever more divisive content (not to mention the special content Grok is now known for), killing jobs and replacing genuine human creativity by a cheap, warped imitation thereof.
My opinion is: Everybody who uses or promotes this technology is accomplice in making the world a worse place.
“Public” is a tricky term. At this point everything is being treated as public by LLM developers. Maybe not you specifically, but a lot of people aren’t happy with how their data is being used to train AI.
Also they always come up with new ways to circumvent blocking mechanisms and push some extra work to admins.
Remember how judges ruled when somebody circumvented copy restrictions on media?