this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

“It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 day ago

This sort of thing has been a strategy for dealing with unwanted web crawlers since web crawlers were a thing. It's an arms race, though; crawlers do things to detect these "mazes" and so the maze-makers keep needing to up their game as well.

As we enter an age where AI is effectively passing the Turing Test, it's going to be tricky making traps for them that don't also ensnare the actual humans you're trying to serve pages to.