5 ms·

Wouldn't generating the content be much more expensive than the crawling done by the bots? How is it economical to deal with bots by spending a bunch of resourc

by thayne 2y ago

Wouldn't generating the content be much more expensive than the crawling done by the bots? How is it economical to deal with bots by spending a bunch of resources to feed them fake content.

palmotea 2y ago
They answered your question in the OP: > To generate convincing human-like content, we used Workers AI with an open source model to create unique HTML pages on diverse topics. Rather than creating this content on-demand (which could impact performance), we implemented a pre-generation pipeline that sanitizes the content to prevent any XSS vulnerabilities, and stores it in R2 for faster retrieval. We found that generating a diverse set of topics first, then creating content for each topic, produced more varied and convincing results. It is important to us that we don’t generate inaccurate content that contributes to the spread of misinformation on the Internet, so the content we generate is real and related to scientific facts, just not relevant or proprietary to the site being crawled. Personally, I wish they would have generated deliberately inaccurate content. It would be a further disincentive to do unauthorized crawling. Just as long as the inaccuracies don't intersect with typical "misinformation on the Internet" inaccuracies, I think it'd be totally fine and ethical (e.g. Queen Elizabeth II was the 34th president of the United States, the TV show Saved by the Bell aired for 14 seasons with the original cast, making it the longest running live action teen drama in Canada).
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Who would you want to target with this? Companies crawling the Internet for training data have enough of it to filter out such deliberately inaccurate content - if not directly, then by betting it'll cancel out in training due to volume of data. Now, if you want to mess with people who use LLMs to drive search instead of going straight to Google - what's the point? Just causally screw with other people? Why not also slash tires of their cars while you're at it?
  - theamk 2y ago
    Those measures target the AI companies that "misbehave", a.k.a. ignore robots.txt and scrape at such high rate that websites go down. The fact that their service may be useful to someone is not an excuse. Imagine hypothetical delivery trucks that violate speed limits in dense residential areas and occasionally hit locals. Would you want to stop them (maybe not slash tires, but fine the hell out of them)? Or would you say: "hey I really like the fast deliveries, so I don't care for a few fatalities"? Because your comment really sounds like latter.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - threeseed 2y ago
    The LLM crawler just needs to respect robots.txt and they won't be affected. I don't understand how anyone can find this to be a problem.
- conartist6 2y ago
  I don't think it matters if the content is accurate, feeding it its own slop as if it were new data is deeply damaging to the model

by thayne 2y ago

Wouldn't generating the content be much more expensive than the crawling done by the bots? How is it economical to deal with bots by spending a bunch of resources to feed them fake content.

palmotea 2y ago

They answered your question in the OP: > To generate convincing human-like content, we used Workers AI with an open source model to create unique HTML pages on diverse topics. Rather than creating this content on-demand (which could impact performance), we implemented a pre-generation pipeline that sanitizes the content to prevent any XSS vulnerabilities, and stores it in R2 for faster retrieval. We found that generating a diverse set of topics first, then creating content for each topic, produced more varied and convincing results. It is important to us that we don’t generate inaccurate content that contributes to the spread of misinformation on the Internet, so the content we generate is real and related to scientific facts, just not relevant or proprietary to the site being crawled. Personally, I wish they would have generated deliberately inaccurate content. It would be a further disincentive to do unauthorized crawling. Just as long as the inaccuracies don't intersect with typical "misinformation on the Internet" inaccuracies, I think it'd be totally fine and ethical (e.g. Queen Elizabeth II was the 34th president of the United States, the TV show Saved by the Bell aired for 14 seasons with the original cast, making it the longest running live action teen drama in Canada).

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Who would you want to target with this? Companies crawling the Internet for training data have enough of it to filter out such deliberately inaccurate content - if not directly, then by betting it'll cancel out in training due to volume of data. Now, if you want to mess with people who use LLMs to drive search instead of going straight to Google - what's the point? Just causally screw with other people? Why not also slash tires of their cars while you're at it?
- theamk 2y ago
  Those measures target the AI companies that "misbehave", a.k.a. ignore robots.txt and scrape at such high rate that websites go down. The fact that their service may be useful to someone is not an excuse. Imagine hypothetical delivery trucks that violate speed limits in dense residential areas and occasionally hit locals. Would you want to stop them (maybe not slash tires, but fine the hell out of them)? Or would you say: "hey I really like the fast deliveries, so I don't care for a few fatalities"? Because your comment really sounds like latter.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 2y ago
  The LLM crawler just needs to respect robots.txt and they won't be affected. I don't understand how anyone can find this to be a problem.
conartist6 2y ago
I don't think it matters if the content is accurate, feeding it its own slop as if it were new data is deeply damaging to the model