this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025

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292

Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[+] ToadOfHypnosis@lemm.ee 58 points 4 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

"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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense,”

Looking for porn me with red eyes swearing at the screen.

[–] singletona@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

...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!

[–] turmacar@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oooh, that sounds like an interesting read. Do you happen to have the DOI?

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think this is it - https://eudl.eu/doi/10.1145/1460877.1460907 .

[–] SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thank you for taking the time!

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

It's definitely an arms race. One other outcome is that it gets too expensive to be cost effective and slows down that way.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 26 points 4 months ago

Feeding AI crawlers the excrement of their forebears is a perfect way to deal with them.

[–] sundrei@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 4 months ago

endless maze of irrelevant facts

oh on I've been turned into an AI :(

[–] lath@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

So they grasped the inevitable and dove right into it.

[–] kokesh@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Love this!

[–] JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 months ago

I really want to see what the bullshit looks like - shame the article doesn't actually show a sample, guess I'd have to make my browser look like an AI crawler

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 months ago

Heh, sounds like what one of my exes used to do when she wanted some alone time, she'd throw me an informational rabbit hole and let me dive right in it for a couple of hours=)))

[–] Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

This is so cyberpunk.