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No AI Content
- frizlab 1y agoI do agree that no AI content is primordial and I’d personally accompany it with a “no AI crawlers allowed”. Feeding AI with new high quality content only add to the problem. We must stop feeding it.
- altairprime 1y agoSet your site to 401 unauthorized with a basic challenge if an auth header isn’t sent, and set the auth description to “Enter anything to proceed. All human access is authorized. Unauthorized non-human access is prohibited.”. Crawlers can’t parse the instructions and will deadstop on them, while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work. Anubis is also viable and popular, but it lacks the legal threat to AI of being able to file a federal hacking claim against a scraper’s unauthorized intrusion if they code their scraper to transmit an empty/invalid/valid authentication header.
- noman-land 1y agoCan you say more about why a crawler couldn't parse an auth deacription and also what is an auth description?
- orkj 1y ago> what is an auth description? They are probably referring to the text in the basic auth "pop-up" which is usually set like WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="my text"
- altairprime 1y agoYep!
- altairprime 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44701725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44701725
- makingstuffs 1y agoVery feasible solution I guess the only issue is that we now have to add friction for legitimate users which will only accelerate their migration to AI summaries at the top of the page.
- altairprime 1y agoAI is on course to destroy anonymous web browsing due to the costs it inflicts on server operators; user friction, whether via manual input or proof of work interstitial or otherwise, is the only remaining alternative to attested identity, pseudonymous or not. This is HN, so I’m suggesting a non-attestation solution, which is therefore user friction.
- makingstuffs 1y agoOh I agree with you entirely, not in disagreement at all. Just highlighting the absurdity of the world that this is where we are. I was discussing with my partner recently the fact that I believe this is all heading to a licensed, centralised internet. I can very easily foresee the path we are blindly wandering leading to an authoritarian space in which websites and hosting will only be available to a select few, for a hefty fee. The justification will be ‘think of the children’ or ‘we need to control what your AI agents can connect to as there are bad actors whom will convince your AI agents to give them your funds and personal, private data’ Obviously just pure speculative hyperbole to be taken with a tbsp of salt, but, yeah, I can see the path quite clearly judging by how little friction governments get for their reckless and nefarious actions nowadays.
- altairprime 1y agoUltimately, the web will revert to where it was before full text search harvested and profited from all the curated indexes of content — and, bluntly, we did fine back then! It was a lot less shitty of a web than we have now :) And it’ll be a lot easier to be open with others when someone can’t just full-text search their way to our bulletin board (forums used to be called that, since they derived their core structure from BBSes!) to hate on us. Will be harder to use the web for problem-solving in esoteric corner cases, because you’ll have to find the right enthusiast community and jump through some hoops to sign up and become a trusted member. Can’t wait, honestly.
- AznHisoka 1y ago“while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work.” I think you might be overestiating how much patience humans have when browsing a site
- altairprime 1y agoI think you might be overestimating how little I care if humans don’t interact with my content. If it’s not worth five seconds of their time to type a word and click OK, I have better things to do than trying to coddle them into caring about me.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> Crawlers can’t parse the instructions What decade do you think it is? :) Depending on who you ask, captcha bots have become better at solving them than humans... There's almost nothing you can do that "AI" can't while keeping it easy enough for your average joe that wants to login. Especially considering "the grandma test"...
- altairprime 1y agoIt’s trivial for them to solve this automatically. It’s also illegal under the computer fraud and abuse act, because then they’re knowingly and intentionally bypassing for profit (fraud) a clearly defined authorization barrier that explicitly prohibits their (ab)use. No joke, that’s an actual U.S. federal crime, and it would hold up well enough to reach a courtroom to be judged. (Can’t say what would happen after that — the law is not code, etc.) That’s why it’s so effective: it doesn’t matter that they can bypass it, it matters that they could be jailed if they do so, and corporations only take risks whose profits can pay for the penalties incurred. The cost of federal prison is well in excess of what most corporate leaders will tolerate :) ps. I learned assembly programming from my grandma. She would have loved to discuss this problem with me.
- fc417fc802 1y agoJust because it's called authentication doesn't mean that all possible applications of it qualify. Following directions provided by the owner isn't breaking into the system. Clicking "Yes I'm over 18" when you aren't isn't a violation of the CFAA any more than any other ToS violation is. What matters isn't the box presenting the challenge but rather the nature of the challenge itself.
- altairprime 1y agoPerhaps! But for some weird reason, I bet you’ll find no one except e.g. Yandex is willing to code their AI scraper to attempt passwords at websites — because, as noted, only a courtroom can determine with certainty the exposure to legal risk here, and so long as usage isn’t widespread there’s no profit in accepting that risk.
- dylan604 1y ago> Crawlers can’t parse the instructions and will deadstop on them, while people will shrug and enter any password, which will work. Well, that just seems like something where they will just fix the glitch. Do you really think that the devs of bots can't fix this instead of it just haven't fixed it yet?
- altairprime 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44701725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44701725
- dylan604 1y agoCorporations can't be jailed. They just pay fines. So, not really sure what the point is. You also have to realize that not all devs that create bots are under the jurisdiction of US law. So again I ask, what's your point?
- altairprime 1y agoI acknowledge both your disagreement, and that my position may be pointless to some.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- CafeRacer 1y agoSo... a reasonably stupid question - captchas and bot protection (e.g. cloudflare stuff) do not deter bots anymore?
- wild_egg 1y agoThey're more of a speed bump. Deter drive-by scraping and whatever they call script kiddies these days.
- throwup238 1y agoHaven’t for a while. There’s a bunch of open source projects that provide a Captcha and Cloudflare bypass proxy where you just point your scraping through the proxy and it takes care of the challenges. It’s rather trivial to handle nowadays. A bunch of the torrent trackers are now behind Cloudflare so the pirate community has been maintaining many of these projects in order to enable their autodownloaders like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc.
- 1shooner 1y agoThere is a product category around this, e.g.: https://docs.browserbase.com/features/stealth-mode#captcha-solving https://docs.browserbase.com/features/stealth-mode#captcha-s... Personally, I see this as ToS violation-as-a-service, but I guess ethics left the AI stack space a while ago.
- bilgi42 1y ago[flagged]
- beardedwizard 1y agoWhat ads?
- weikju 1y agoYou misread. It’s the site plagiarizing their articles that has the ads. So take that river back please.
- ballenf 1y ago> Nothing that I publish here has come from AI or answer engines. Every word that is written comes from this human. I think we're rapidly approaching the point where no one will be able to make this claim anymore. AI summaries and answers are ubiquitous and our knowledge or beliefs are directly or indirectly informed by them. We can avoid 1st order AI use, but it is impossible to avoid 2nd order and further exposure. The water supply has been poisoned and everyone needs to drink.
- Mk2000 1y agoI feel like we're going though an evolution of the web, and no matter what we do, it's going to happen. The web is going to change (for better or worse) or die, and there's nothing we can do about it. The web killed printed media to a large degree and AI will do the same, Resistance is futile!
- paul7986 1y agoWithout authors being paid to create new content AI is nothing/it's irrelevant! Either some startup needs to come up with compensation for authors or the big players need to set up a system that still gets authors paid as Im guessing in five to ten years we are not visiting websites. Our soon to be AI friend (Facetime the "friend," or just talk or text it) seen on our lockscreens or in a hologram is visiting all sites to create visuals of the info and displaying/discussing it with us immediately upon request.
- cootsnuck 1y agoYou may be right that resistance is futile. But I don't think adaptation is. And there's no reason our adaptation can't be rooted in resistance. For example, maybe smaller local forums make a comeback and their communities decide to hide all threads behind auth. (I don't necessarily see that happening, just an example.) And honestly given the stronger feelings people are developing against what I'll just call "creative use of generative AI", I'm starting to think maybe resistance isn't futile... Poisoning original digital art so it's less useful for image generators...social shaming of AI generated music being laundered on platforms...those things do feel like meaningful steps towards resistance.
- notarobot123 1y agoPrinted media, radio and television are still very much alive and well, just not as big as they once were. We've past peak Web but it's not going anywhere anytime soon. We do need new protocols though. As a social network the web is collapsing but it is entirely possible that a new kind of internet could emerge in its place. After all, routing around damage is part of the essence of the Internet.
- sp4cemoneky 1y agoTo be honest, is it really that bad that the web is dead? I understand the value of a forum, but as far as the content is concerned if we were to go back to the days of physical magazines I wouldn't be upset.
- pentamassiv 1y agoOnly that there is no way back. Those physical magazines would contain the same AI generated content.
- pyman 1y agoHumans still write for sites behind paywalls like Wired, WSJ, FT, NatGeo, NYT, and The Economist, but I don't hear anyone say "I'm finally going to pay for good content written by humans." Instead, all I hear is people complaining about the flood of AI-generated crap. My advice: Subscribe to one or two sites or newsletters, and all your problems are solved.
- sp4cemoneky 1y agoI don't know, I personally miss subscriptions to physical, there is the wait, there is also the whole reading in physical reality experience. Also, whilst I am sure the quality of payed online magazines is better, once you start reading the cheap/free online crap, it is impossible to switch to a higher quality, and I always start my day with the cheap crap.
- dotancohen 1y agoIt is not the medium that is dying, rather it is the content that is dying. People are saying the web is dying because there's no longer financial incentive for actual humans to create content (there may be other incentives, and those types of forms may flourish). That goes equally for other media as well: print, digital, it doesn't matter.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
- sixQuarks 1y agoSo AI writers will now include an owl emoji to indicate that they are human writers. This is so useless
- chrismorgan 1y ago> Both are well worth the effort of creating an account to read them. Talking about how AI broke the web, while gating the content in a way that breaks the web, which they’ve been doing since before the AI/LLM threat came on the scene. (According to <https://medium.com/whats-new-in-publishing/inside-the-economists-data-driven-paywall-evolution-dd28f0913b7a https://medium.com/whats-new-in-publishing/inside-the-econom...>, they always had a soft paywall, but they diminished their free article limits steadily until it reached zero and became a hard paywall in 2019.)
- JimDabell 1y agoOne of the reasons people prefer AI to visiting the source websites is because the source websites have so often made it such an unpleasant experience, making you jump through hoops and navigate a maze of dark patterns. Meanwhile, AI gives you what you want without all those roadblocks. This is like Napster vs iTunes all over again. People started paying for media online as soon as it became convenient to do so. You make things inconvenient for people, you’ll lose out to whatever the more convenient option is.
- johnnienaked 1y agoWho? Who prefers AI?
- frizlab 1y agoIf this is an owl joke it’s hilarious
- JimDabell 1y agoChatGPT alone has 800M WAU and there have been several articles recently describing how AI has a large chilling effect on search engine referrals, including the article we are currently discussing. This is very clearly a mainstream preference.
- johnnienaked 1y ago
- aeon_ai 1y agoTheir frustration with plagiarism, inaccuracy, and the "tragedy of the commons" effect on web content is valid, but that is human behavior - they even cite an example. But "wisdom", if we are going to aspire to that, would look for the ways these tools can be used to better our condition as creators and thinkers, rather than have our opinion be led by a reactive moral narrative not grounded in pragmatism or reality.
- maldonad0 1y agoExcessive pragmatism leads to utilitarianism which is anti-human.
- aeon_ai 1y agoExcessive anything is counterproductive, by definition of being “excessive.” Debate where the line is, if you think it’s worthwhile, but imagine it’s much further than “all AI bad, always.”
- timnetworks 1y agooh okay so it's fine for a multinational conglomerate to steal flagrantly and profit at the various stages of theft they themselves enable.
- aeon_ai 1y agoI will engage in good faith. I do not believe it's theft. I think that 'stealing' is a loaded term that is often used by propagandists who want to drive outrage and anti-AI sentiment (and is readily consumed, as all other propaganda, by people looking to be 'outraged' at yet another example of the `other side` being bad.) What are your thoughts on Aaron Swartz? Do you think he was justifiably prosecuted? We must do mental gymnastics to justify one and not the other. We either value the freedom of information to educate and inspire, or we make ourselves slave to an ossified culture and technological progress that is rented to us by large companies. I propose that we find ourselves conflicted with reconciling the complete and utter myth of Intellectual Property to an era where the system that constructed copyright is no longer relevant. I do not relish that creatives have seen their work evaporate. I do not envy the many who lived their lives forgetting how to learn while relying on a skill that would give them "job security". But getting upset by "big corpo stealing" is not genuinely exploring the fundamental properties of information, the nature of copyright law, and the second and third order impacts of successfully twisting the copyright system to limit AI training.
- rubyfan 1y agoThis resonates with me. I’m willing to pay for content for humans by humans. I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO. It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
- pyman 1y agoAre you saying that now, because of all the AI generated content online, you're suddenly willing to pay for sites like Wired, NatGeo, Popular Mechanics, MIT Tech Review or The Economist? These have been around for ages. Why now, and not before? I'm curious because GenAI might actually help traditional media orgs that still hire humans to write. They just need to move away from hard or metered paywalls and move toward a token model (something less common but growing). Let people buy credits to unlock individual articles instead of forcing a full subscription. Some Substack newsletters are already trying pay-per-post. (Note: I got downvoted for including a US newspaper as an example. I'm not from the US, it was just a random example. I've removed it to avoid unnecessary polarisation.)
- krainboltgreene 1y agoWhat if I want good human content.
- LocalH 1y agoGenerative AI was a huge mistake. We also see the flip side of this in "AI detectors" ensnaring people who are writing the way they always have. We see it in the idea that "if you use too many em dashes, then you must be AI".
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI can just prompt a model to never use em dashes. Which is rather funny to me. I can make it respond like Kamina from Gurren Lagann to hype me up as well.
- firtoz 1y agoBtw that really doesn't work. Try with Chatgpt. It will not stop using em dashes. You will need to write code to clean it up.
- ponector 1y agoBecause you should instruct LLM what to do, not restrict what to not do. Tell LLM to use other symbol instead.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI use other models, but also yelling at ChatGPT typically does the job for me.
- johnnienaked 1y agoAI will be the final nail in the coffin of the internet. What was growth by enshittification has become growth by shit (AI) itself, and there is no going back. Welcome to the shitternet.
- eboynyc32 1y agoDumb dumbs, ai is just a tool. Do you still use an abacus or a computer? Are you walking or driving a car? Should we ponder at the stars or build rockets. Not using ai is insane. It’s the most magical tool I’ve ever used.