this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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But does running this cost the AI bot at least as much as it costs you to run?
Picking words at random from a dictionary would not be very compute intensive, the content doesn't need to be sensical
Yes, the scraper is going to mindlessly gobble up information. At best they'd expend more resources later to try and determine the value of the content but how do you do that really? Mostly I think they're hoping the good will outweigh the bad.
It honestly depends. There are random drive by scrapers that will just do what they can, usually within a specific budget for a domain and move on. If you have something specific though that someone wants you end up in an arms race pretty quickly as they will pay attention and tune their crawler daily.
I was thinking exactly that, generating something like lorem ipsum to cost both time, compute and storage for the crawler.
It will be more complex and require more resources tho.
I'd like to introduce you to Pandora's Pot
I would think yes. The compute needed to make a hyperlink maze is low, compared to the AI processing of the random content, which costs nearly nothing to make, but still costs the same to process as genuine content.
Am I missing something?
I'm wondering about the cost to the server's resources / bandwidth to serve up unlimited random junk also.
But kudos to the developer for making this anyway
This is my concern exactly.
This seems like a neat prank, but a potentially expensive one. Heck, if it works right you could end up with several bots stuck in your maze, perhaps dozens of hundreds. At that point bandwidth becomes my concern.
It does if you use AI to generate the pages it's scraping.