The ars technica article: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt
AI tarpit 1: Nepenthes
AI tarpit 2: Iocaine
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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thanks for the links. the more I read of this the more based it is
Thank you!!
This might explain why newer AI models are going nuts. Good jorb 👍
It absolutely doesn’t. The only model that has “gone nuts” is Grok, and that’s because of malicious code pushed specifically for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
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Nice ..... I look forward to the next generation of AI counter counter measures that will make the internet an even more unbearable mess in order to funnel as much money and control to a small set of idiots that think they can become masters of the universe and own every single penny on the planet.
All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
I will cite the scientific article later when I find it, but essentially you're wrong.
Asking ChatGPT a question doesn't take 1 hour like most of these... this is a very misleading graph
This is actually misleading in the other direction: ChatGPT is a particularly intensive model. You can run a GPT-4o class model on a consumer mid to high end GPU which would then use something in the ballpark of gaming in terms of environmental impact.
You can also run a cluster of 3090s or 4090s to train the model, which is what people do actually, in which case it's still in the same range as gaming. (And more productive than 8 hours of WoW grind while chugging a warmed up Nutella glass as a drink).
Models like Google's Gemma (NOT Gemini these are two completely different things) are insanely power efficient.
I didn't even say which direction it was misleading, it's just not really a valid comparison to compare a single invocation of an LLM with an unrelated continuous task.
You're comparing Volume of Water with Flow Rate. Or if this was power, you'd be comparing Energy (Joules or kWh) with Power (Watts)
Maybe comparing asking ChatGPT a question to doing a Google search (before their AI results) would actually make sense. I'd also dispute those "downloading a file" and other bandwidth related numbers. Network transfers are insanely optimized at this point.
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Wait… I just had an idea.
Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)
Why are the photos all ugly biological things
They were generated using shitty AI models.
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