Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: Why do AI web scrapers take down sites? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by IndigoGollum@lemmy.world to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world

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I'd link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they're from went down a while ago.

At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host's resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?

Edit: Let me elaborate. A lot of the answers i'm seeing are just restating the problem without explaining why LLM scrapers are apparently all either coded by idiots or assholes. I know that they're hitting sites with unreasonable numbers of requests, wasting bandwidth, and making tools like Anubis too important. I know that's what's happening. I'm asking why. What they gain from not being even a little intelligent about this.

With all the money and effort (and maybe even brainpower) going into this, surely there's some explanation beyond incompetence.

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[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

A whole eight seconds? Talk about lucky. We have misbehaving bots that attempt to hit the same page or small handful of pages on our site 50-100 times simultaneously, repeating this every couple of seconds. And they have tons of IP addresses they do it from so you don't see the same IP in your logs more than a couple of times a day. They seem to be doing it specifically to attempt to evade simple IP detection in order to make it harder to block them. And there aren't that many IPv4 addresses in the world anymore, so the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the AI chucklefucks are using some manner of malware to route their traffic through botnets these days. Stealing people's bandwidth and not just their copyrighted content. It'd certainly be on brand.

For my block lists I have to look at patterns of behavior now instead, and even that's not a sure fire thing. It'd be easy to block a legitimate user who just so happens to be trying to load the same page/product at the same time the clankers are fixated on it.

Putting the entire thing behind Cloudflare helped a lot. Unfortunately, I just got an email from them which seems to imply that by default they're going to start letting more bots through, which seems like a counterproductive move...

[–] IndigoGollum@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago

I do wonder about Cloudflare, and the conflict of interest of them being an AI company and an AI defense company at the same time.

[–] dgdft@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the AI chucklefucks are using some manner of malware to route their traffic through botnets these days

Not a conspiracy at all: it’s a whole industry called “resnet proxies” that considerably predates LLMs.

There’s a whole good, bad, and ugly to it; they’re invaluable as a privacy and public-access tool, but also great for blackhats and ticket scalpers. Similarly, the proxy nodes come from a full spectrum of sources ranging from normies getting paid kickbacks to plug a box into their router, to pseudo-ISPs serving ghost clients, to malware farms, and everything in between.