I’ve been thinking lately about AI poisoning. I want to make this post a thread for suggestions about which tools we can use to fight back. Bear in mind that I’m only talking about poisoning tools, not blocklists or bot-detection utilities. Here’s a short list of what I have so far:
Website protection tarpits for text poisoning (fighting web scrapers):
- Nepenthes was one of the first. In the words of its author, “I’m just fed up, and you know what? Let’s fight back, even if it’s not successful. Be indigestible. Grow spikes.” Nepenthes’s demo page is here.
- Iocaine is the best tarpit I know of right now. It’s very well-designed and performant. Version 3.0x is complete, and the fourth version is a work in progress. It’s made by Gergely Nagy, who goes by the pseudonym “algernon”, after the character by the same name from Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. Iocaine’s demo page is here.
Image poisoning tools:
- Nightshade is an image poisoning tool developed by the University of Chicago. Nightshade is a part of the Glaze project, which also includes WebGlaze and Glaze itself.
LightShed isn’t perfect, though, and introduces its own AI bias to images, basically creating AI incest. Plus, it takes them time to run it. Poisoning is still a good idea. Although, yes, LightShed is a problem.