Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots
Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots
"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.
Registration bypass: https://archive.is/3tEl0
From the description, it sounds like this would only have limited effect and only short lived until guardrails are implemented in crawlers.
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.
So it has nothing to do with “AI training” in the usual sense.
It also has nothing to do with real web crawlers. Maybe the first crawlers when the web was a couple million pages were that dumb, but that's ancient history.