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.
For pure data this is way harder.
The trick here is that the website can react to crawling activity.
I see 😔 I saw a Benn Jordan video on the subject a couple of years ago, but it took forever and needed some special equipment that put it out of financial reach for me, at least. I was wondering if anyone knew about any progress on that front.