"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

“It’s less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn’t appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.

  • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
    222·
    17 hours ago

    Yeah thats not real, if you ask chat gpt it gives the obvious answer of you have to look at the pieces. Either its shopped or its leaving off previous messages where the user has deliberately conviced it that it is cheating.

      • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        Se i understand that one, LLMs dont work with letters they work with token which are more like Chinese characters. So even though they display letters to the end used the models themselves dont see them which is why you can get dumb mistakes like that.

        The chess thing is strange though, its not like there is a lake of writing on chess so I do wonder where it got that idea from.

        • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          29 minutes ago

          There’s an ocean of chess games recorded in chess notation. So it’ll play brilliant moves. They may not apply to this game or be legal moves, but in that other situation they were brilliant!