Fighting bots is fighting humans.
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Fighting bots is fighting humans.
One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAccess
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In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as "only allow actual human beings access" because determining who's a human is hard. In practice, it means putting a barrier in front of the website that makes it harder for EVERYONE to access it: gathering personal data, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, etc.
http://mollywhite.net/micro/entry/fighting-bots-is-fighting-humans
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@molly0xfff Isn't there a possibility of option 1.1? Keep things open but have SOMETHING in place to keep the abuse, at least moderately, in check?
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@scottjenson sure. i'm not saying everyone should, say, drop DDoS protection.
but "only allow humans to access" is just not a feasible metric — you will ALWAYS let bots through and prevent humans, and you need to decide where you want to set the cutoff.
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@molly0xfff
I think it's time to return to printed and mailed newsletters. -
@molly0xfff I am averse to serving as a #meatpuppet #smoketester for shitty AI tech so I will continue to try to Rule 2 #optout. I understand dickheads and have worked for many. Supertrained AI models nobody understands, OTOH and they are freaking dangerous. Fighting bots is our future.
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@molly0xfff I like Jeremy Keith’s 1.5 option of acknowledging, not accepting, via poisoning https://adactio.com/journal/21210
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@vonExplaino i would never
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@molly0xfff I’ve got a blog post in the works about this but there’s a third option we should be considering:
Making it more expensive to download and parse by rejecting the corporate-friendly facism of minimalism and plaintext and re-embracing the creative possibilities of the multimedia web.
If a blog post was the same rough size as a YouTube video and required a scraper to understand a complex css layout and rich interactive context the scraping difficulty and the possibilities for unique, luxurious creation go through the roof in a way that cannot be replicated or co-opted by corps.
I say it’s time to discard the markdown web and for the dawn of the indie baroque.