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AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

(pod.geraspora.de)
770 points ta988 | 1 comments | 30 Dec 24 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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walterbell ◴[30 Dec 24 16:51 UTC] No.42551009[source]▶
OpenAI publishes IP ranges for their bots, https://github.com/greyhat-academy/lists.d/blob/main/scraper...

For antisocial scrapers, there's a Wordpress plugin, https://kevinfreitas.net/tools-experiments/

> The words you write and publish on your website are yours. Instead of blocking AI/LLM scraper bots from stealing your stuff why not poison them with garbage content instead? This plugin scrambles the words in the content on blog post and pages on your site when one of these bots slithers by.

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brookst ◴[30 Dec 24 16:58 UTC] No.42551078[source]▶
The latter is clever but unlikely to do any harm. These companies spend a fortune on pre-training efforts and doubtlessly have filters to remove garbage text. There are enough SEO spam pages that just list nonsense words that they would have to.
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rickyhatespeas ◴[30 Dec 24 17:42 UTC] No.42551547[source]▶
It will do harm to their own site considering it's now un-indexable on platforms used by hundreds of millions and growing. Anyone using this is just guaranteeing that their content will be lost to history at worst, or just inaccessible to most search engines/users at best. Congrats on beating the robots, now every time someone searches for your site they will be taken straight to competitors.
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1. luckylion ◴[30 Dec 24 18:35 UTC] No.42552139[source]▶
You can still fine-tune though. I often run User-Agent: *, Disallow: / with User-Agent: Googlebot, Allow: / because I just don't care for Yandex or baidu to crawl me for the 1 user/year they'll send (of course this depends on the region you're offering things to).

That other thing is only a more extreme form of the same thing for those who don't behave. And when there's a clear value proposition in letting OpenAI ingest your content you can just allow them to.