The article discusses a controversial response to AI crawler behavior, particularly how developers like 'Aaron' have created malware, such as 'Nepenthes', to hinder aggressive web scraping by AI systems. Inspired by the way crawlers ignore 'robots.txt' directives, Aaron designed Nepenthes to trap AI crawlers in a loop of static files, where they waste resources and can be bombarded with nonsensical data. This new tactic adapts existing anti-spam technologies for use against AI, marking a shift in the ongoing conflict over data scraping practices online.
Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models.
Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers.
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