Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives.
-
Ok, I now need a screensaver that I can tie to a cloudflare instance that visualizes the generated "maze" and a bot's attempts to get out.
You probably just should let an AI generate that.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Will it actually allow ordinary users to browse normally, though? Their other stuff breaks in minority browsers. Have they tested this well enough so that it won't? (I'd bet not.)
-
This post did not contain any content.
Cloudflare kind of real for this. I love it.
It makes perfect sense for them as a business, infinite automated traffic equals infinite costs and lower server stability, but at the same time how often do giant tech companies do things that make sense these days?
-
Next step is an AI that detects AI labyrinth.
It gets trained on labyrinths generated by another AI.
So you have an AI generating labyrinths to train an AI to detect labyrinths which are generated by another AI so that your original AI crawler doesn't get lost.
It's gonna be AI all the way down.
All the while each AI costs more power than a million human beings to run, and the world burns down around us.
-
The problem I see with poisoning the data is the AI's being trained for law enforcement hallucinating false facts used to arrest and convict people.
They aren't poisoning the data with disinformation.
They're poisoning it with accurate, but irrelevant information.
For example, if a bot is crawling sites relating to computer programming, or weather, this tool might lure the crawler into pages related to animal facts, or human biology.
-
Next step is an AI that detects AI labyrinth.
It gets trained on labyrinths generated by another AI.
So you have an AI generating labyrinths to train an AI to detect labyrinths which are generated by another AI so that your original AI crawler doesn't get lost.
It's gonna be AI all the way down.
LLMs tend to be really bad at detecting AI generated content. I can’t imagine specialized models are much better. For the crawler, it’s also exponentially more expensive.
-
So the world is now wasting energy and resources to generate AI content in order to combat AI crawlers, by making them waste more energy and resources. Great!
The energy cost of inference is overstated. Small models, or “sparse” models like Deepseek are not that expensive to run. Training is a one-time cost that still pales in comparison to industrial processes.
Basically, only Altman wants it to be cost prohibitive so he can have a monopoly. Also, he’s full of shit.
-
This post did not contain any content.
So the web is a corporate war zone now and you can choose feudal protection or being attacked from all sides. What a time to be alive.
-
the used market
-
I would love to think so. But the word "verified" suggests more.
IP verification is a not uncommon method for commercial crawlers
-
given what domains we're hosted on; i think we've both had a version of this conversation about a thousand times, and both ended up where we ended up. do you want us to explain hypothetically-at-but-mostly-past each other again? I can do it while un-sober, if you like.
Not who you responded to but yeah I want to hear a drug fuelled rant I don't even care what topic
-
Any accessibility service will also see the "hidden links", and while a blind person with a screen reader will notice if they wonder off into generated pages, it will waste their time too.
Also, I don't know about you, but I absolutely have a use for crawling X, Google maps, Reddit, YouTube, and getting information from there without interacting with the service myself.
I'd assume they're using aria tags to hide the links from screen readers, at least that's what the article seems to imply.
-
This post did not contain any content.
And this, ladies and gentleman, is how you actually make profits on AI.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.
-
Next step is an AI that detects AI labyrinth.
It gets trained on labyrinths generated by another AI.
So you have an AI generating labyrinths to train an AI to detect labyrinths which are generated by another AI so that your original AI crawler doesn't get lost.
It's gonna be AI all the way down.
Yeah that’s how we achieve singularity.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Now this is a AI trap worth using. Don't waste your money and resources hosting something yourself, let Cloudflare do it for you if you don't want AI scraping your shit.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Relevant excerpt from part 11 of Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:
::: spoiler Artificial Inanity
Note: Reticulum=Internet, syndev=computer, crap~=spam“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.
“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.
“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.
“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”
“The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.
“Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”
“So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?”
“Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”
::: -
This post did not contain any content.
This is so fucking retarded on so many levels. It's time to regulate the shit out of "AI".
-
I swear someone released this exact thing a few weeks ago
We want names
-
This post did not contain any content.
hey look it's that "zip bomb" I mentioned.
fuck cloudflare though.
