I work in a lab, so yes, I understand how data science works. However, I think you have too much faith in the people running these scrapers.

I think it’s unlikely that ChatGPT would have had those early scandals of leaking people’s SSNs or other private information if the data was actually “cleared by a human team” The entire point of these big companies is laziness; I doubt they have someone looking over the thousands of sites worth of data they feed to their models.

Maybe they do quality checks on the data but even in that event, forcing them to toss out a large data set because some of it was poisoned is a loss for the company. And if enough people poison their work or are able to feed poison to the scrapers, it becomes much less profitable to scrape images automatically.

I previously mentioned methods for possibly slipping through automatic filters in the scraper (though maybe I mentioned that in a different comment chain).

As for a scraper acting like a human by use of an LLM, that sounds hella computationally expensive on the side of the scrapers. There would be few willing to put in that much effort, fewer scrapers makes DDOS like effect of scraping less likely. It would also take more time which means the scraper is spending less time harassing others.

But these are good suggestions. I suppose a drastic option for fighting a true AI mimicking a human would be to make all links have a random chance of sending any user to the tarpit. People would know to click back and try again, but the AI would at best have to render the site, process what it sees, decide it is in the tarpit, and then return. That would further slow down the scraper (or very likely stop/trap it) but that would make it slightly annoying for regular users.

In any case, at a certain point, trying to tailor an AI scraper to avoid a single specific website and navigate the traps for it would probably take more time and effort than sending a human to aggregate the content instead of an automated scraper

Oh when you said arms race I thought you were referring to all anti-AI countermeasures including Anubis and tarpits.

Were you only saying you think AI poisoning methods like Glaze and Nightshade are futile? Or do you also think AI mazes/tarpits are futile?

Both kind of seem like a more selfless version of protection like Anubis.

Instead of protecting your own site from scrapers, a tarpit will trap the scraper, stopping it from causing harm to other people’s services whether they have their own protections in place or not.

In the case of poisoning, you also protect others by making it more risky for AI to train on automatically scraped data which would deincentivize automated scrapers from being used on the net in the first place

With aggressive scrapers, the “change” is having sites slowed or taken offline, being basically DDOSed by scrapers ignoring robots.txt.

What is your proposed adaptation that’s better than countermeasures? Be rich enough to afford more powerful hardware? Simply stop hosting anything on the internet?

Isn’t that what the arms race is? Adapting to new situations?

I guess diversity of tactics probably is a good way to stop scrapers from avoiding the traps we set. Good on you for helping out. Also I like the name lol

On a slightly unrelated note, is rust a web dev language? I’ve been meaning to learn it myself since I’ve heard it’s basically a better, modern alternative to C++

That’s the intent behind Nightshade right?

Would overlaying the image with a different, slightly transparent image be enough to shift the weights? Or is there a specific method of pseudorandom hostile noise generation that you’d suggest?

I’d imagine the former is likely more computationally efficient, but if the latter is more effective at poisoning and your goal is to maximize damage regardless of cost, then that would be the better option.

Nice straw man infographic, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant.

My post was about methods to poison art scraping models. I said nothing about my reasons for doing so, maybe I just like fucking up corpos. Maybe I just like thinking about interesting topics and hearing other people’s ideas.

Kind of sad that you’re worked up enough about this to both miss the point, and to have an infographic on hand just in case you get offended by anyone not praising generative AI.

If you do have any knowledge of how AI functions, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the topic which, again, is on how to poison models that use image scrapers, not the ethics of AI or lack thereof.