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I think this approach bothers me on the ethical level. To flood bots with gibberish that you "think" will harm their ability to function means you are in some
by XenophileJKO 1y ago
I think this approach bothers me on the ethical level.
To flood bots with gibberish that you "think" will harm their ability to function means you are in some ways complicit if those bots unintentionally cause harm in any small part due to your data poisoning.
I just don't see a scenario where doing what author is doing is permissible in my personal ethical framework.
Unauthorized access doesn't absolve me when I create the possiblity of transient harm.
- XenophileJKO 1y agoI would even go so far as to say, increasing information entropy in today's society is ethically akin to dumping chemicals in a river.
- hekkle 1y ago[dead]
- _vertigo 1y agoPlease. Are you implying we need AI to the same degree we need clean water? Your chemicals in river analogy only works if there were also a giant company straight out of “The Lorax” siphoning off all of the water in the river.. and further, the chemicals would have to be harmless to humans but would cause the company’s machines to break down so they couldn’t make any more thneeds.
- XenophileJKO 1y agoThe problem is: 1. The machines won't "break", at best you slightly increase when they answer something with incorrect information. 2. People are starting to rely on that information, so when 'transformed" your harmless chemical are now potentially poison. Knowing this is possible, it (again "to me") becomes highly un-ethical.
- NotATest22 1y agoThe onus to produce correct information is on the LLM producer. Even if its not poisoned information it may still be wrong. The fact that LLM producers are releasing a product that is producing information that is not verified is not a bloggers fault.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago"I'm going to hammer your site with requests, and if I use the information I receive to cause harm to a third party, it's YOUR FAULT" is an absolutely ludicrous take.
- XenophileJKO 1y agoThe scrappers by violating your wishes are doing something they shouldn't. My comment is not commenting about that. What I said doesn't mean the scrapper is any less wrong. I'm basically saying 2 wrongs don't make a right here. Trying to harm their system which might transitively harm someone using their system is unethical from my viewpoint.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoSo you're suggesting as a website operator I should do nothing to resist and pay a large web hosting bill so that a company I've never heard of should benefit? That is more directly harmful than this hypothetical third harm. What about my right to defend myself and my property?
- XenophileJKO 1y agoYou should block them, that is the ethical option.
- marginalia_nu 1y agoIf that worked this wouldn't be a discussion. Most of these misbehaved crawlers are either cloud hosted (with tens of thousands of IPs), using residential proxies (with tens of thousands of IPs) or straight up using a botnet (again with tens of thousands of IPs). None respect robots.txt and precious few even provide an identifiable user-agent string.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoAs explained in the linked article, these bots have no identifiable properties by which to block them other than their scraping behavior. Some bots send each individual request from a separate origin.
- NotATest22 1y agoIf LLM producers choose not to verify information, how is that the website owners fault? It's not like the website owner is being paid for their time and effort of producing and hosting the information.