Programming

I guess diversity of tactics probably is a good way to stop scrapers from avoiding the traps we set. Good on you for helping out. Also I like the name lol

On a slightly unrelated note, is rust a web dev language? I’ve been meaning to learn it myself since I’ve heard it’s basically a better, modern alternative to C++

It might be easier to make a few images with some anti-AI patterns, and then give them randomly generated file names and paths. If needed, you could do some subtle transformations each time but generating a new image each time might be more effort than its worth

This thought did cross my mind, but I bet the quality filters probably check for the relevancy of words. And if they don’t already, it wouldn’t take long for them to implement a simple fix.

Generating an AI image based on the text you randomly generate would satisfy this and still cause model decay, but in both cases, generating AI images is pretty costly which means it’s not a very viable attack option for most people.

Cloudflare does use AI to generate tarpit content, but it's too expensive to run for every request. IIRC, they periodically change and cache the output to throw off the tarpit detectors.

One thing most DON'T do is change up the format for the page, so the placement and number of links randomize.

The images probably don't have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

I’d heard of Glaze before and Nightshade seems useful, but only Glaze protects against mimicry and the Nightshade page makes it seem like the researchers aren’t sure how well the two would do together.

It looks like Nightshade is doing what I described (though on a single image basis) of trying to trick the AI into believing the characteristics of one thing apply to another, but I’d imagine that poisoning could be much more potent if the constraint of “still looks the same to a human” were voided.

If you know you’re feeding an AI, you can go all out on the poisoning. No one cares what it looks like as long as the AI thinks it’s valid.

As for the difficulties in generating meaningful images, it would certainly be more intense than Markov chain text generation, but I think it might not be that hard if you just modify the real art from the site.

Say you just slapped a ton of Snapchat filters on an artwork, or used a blur tool in random places, or drew random line segments that are roughly the same color as their nearby pixels, and maybe shift the hue and saturation. I bet small modifications like that could slip through quality filters but still cause damage to the model.

Edit: Just realized this might sound like I’m suggesting that messing up the art shown on the site through more destructive means would be better than Glaze or Nightshade. That’s not what I meant.

Those edit suggestions were only for the art shown in the tarpit, so you’d only make those destructive modifications to the art you’re showing the AI scrapers. The source images shown to human patrons can remain unedited.

Looking in that thread it seems to be largely small scale/fine tuning where the data is cherrypicked... they're not considering the corporations which create the models they're finetuning in the first place

That thread was hard to read. I do sometimes feel bad for people who don’t understand artists because they don’t realize they have the capability to be artists themselves.

I do realize that any poisoning of models won’t stop backups of the pre-decay models from being utilized, but if we make the web unscrapable, it will slow or even prevent art from being stolen in the future.

I highly doubt the big AI companies get people to screen the scraped images (at least not all of them) because the whole point in their mind is to remove the need to pay people for work lol

Oh wow I’m dense, I didn’t even think about the fact that scrapers probably don't render the full webpage and instead just seek out images in the HTML lol

This seems like a much easier to set up trap than creating a tarpit and then serving bullshit images.

Would it negatively impact the loading times for regular users? Like would it take significant amounts of time for the webpage to load if you added hundreds of these hidden images?