Bots are currently scraping the internet for LLM training data at unprecedented rates[1][2][3], driving up costs and destabilizing public-facing websites. I want to talk about how this has been particularly difficult for wikis, and has gotten much worse in the last few months.
This is a great post about such a frustrating and sucky situation. Thank you for sharing it with us here. I really feel for all the smaller sites and webmasters who have to deal with all this absurdity. :(
Like they mentioned, when I hit one of those damn Cloudflare ‘prove you’re a human’ checks – which is a LOT nowadays – I definitely do get irritated…but I’m not usually upset with the site owner who is just trying to protect their site. I feel for them. I’m pissed off and disgusted at all the greedy, inconsiderate assholes and corporations who are fucking everything up for us normal people, both on the Internet and off.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I hope it somehow gets better soon… ugh.
And so the Tragedy of the Commons plays out, yet again.
There’s no cost to being a selfish asshole, so it’s sadly not surprising that many individual actors are destroying the public Internet. Like, how can we align incentives to stop this? Regulations/laws are mostly pointless since the very same tactics used to dodge bot detection also make it incredibly hard to identify the originator.
The only other disincentive with a real cost, that I can think of, would be to poison the data fed to scrapers, so they get bad data? That seems expensive to set up, though.
I think TFA has the best solution idea: make it easy to scrape all the useful data using a low-cost standardized system. Then there’s no incentive to scrape the website using a stupid, expensive crawler in the first place.
Edit: actually, LLMs make poisoning the data fairly reasonable… When there’s a high volume of requests for outdated pages/edit pages/other rarely accessed pages, have the server serve a pre-cached parody version of the root page instead. Pre-build one parody copy of each page with a standardized prompt, like “rewrite this page like it comes from an academic journal of medicine or economics with APA citations for every fact.”