How you can help: If you run a website and can filter traffic by user agent, get a list of the known AI scrapers agent strings and selectively redirect their requests to pre-generated AI slop. Regular visitors will see the content and the LLM scraper bots will scrape their own slop and, hopefully, train on it.
This would ideally become standardized among web servers with an option to easily block various automated aggregators.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on - social media, public image storage, copyrighted media, etc. All those sites with extensive privacy policies who are signing contracts to permit their content for training.
Without laws (and I’m not sure I support anything in this regard yet), I do not see AI progress slowing. Clearly inbreeding AI models has a similar effect as in nature. Fortunately there is enough original digital content out there that this does not need to happen.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on
Absolutely. It’s more a matter of principle for me. Kind of like the digital equivalent of leaving fake Amazon packages full of dog poo out front to make porch pirates have a bad day.
AI already long ago stopped being trained on any old random stuff that came along off the web. Training data is carefully curated and processed these days. Much of it is synthetic, in fact.
These breathless articles about model collapse dooming AI are like discovering that the sun sets at night and declaring solar power to be doomed. The people working on this stuff know about it already and long ago worked around it.
Preserved and curated datasets to train AI on, gathered before AI was mainstream. This has the disadvantage of being stuck in time, so-to-speak.
New datasets that will inevitably contain AI generated content, even with careful curation. So to take the other commenter’s analogy, it’s a shit sandwich that has some real ingredients, and doodoo smeared throughout.
They’re not both true, though. It’s actually perfectly fine for a new dataset to contain AI generated content. Especially when it’s mixed in with non-AI-generated content. It can even be better in some circumstances, that’s what “synthetic data” is all about.
The various experiments demonstrating model collapse have to go out of their way to make it happen, by deliberately recycling model outputs over and over without using any of the methods that real-world AI trainers use to ensure that it doesn’t happen. As I said, real-world AI trainers are actually quite knowledgeable about this stuff, model collapse isn’t some surprising new development that they’re helpless in the face of. It’s just another factor to include in the criteria for curating training data sets. It’s already a “solved” problem.
The reason these articles keep coming around is that there are a lot of people that don’t want it to be a solved problem, and love clicking on headlines that say it isn’t. I guess if it makes them feel better they can go ahead and keep doing that, but supposedly this is a technology community and I would expect there to be some interest in the underlying truth of the matter.
It’s kinda interesting in how it actually roughly parallels the dawn of the nuclear age in some specific ways. Namely, that there’s a clear “purity” line established by the advent of the technology - and I mean that literally, not figuratively. Content on the internet is going to have a very similar dividing line. But it’s also going to be way harder to definitively source data from before that line, unless someone clairvoyant happened to offline and archive a huge storage array with a complete internet snapshot right before ML made its public debut. And I know exactly what the scale of that storage commitment would be, and how much it would cost. So I’m certain nobody has done that.
Okay but I like using perchance cus they dont profit off anything 👉👈
a large chunk of that site is some dudes lil hobby project and its kinda neat interacting with the community and seein how the code works. Its the only bot I’ll ever use cus they arent profiting off of other people shit. the only money they get is from ads and thats it.
Dont kill me with downvotes, I like making up cool OC concepts or poses n stuff and then drawing em.
Let’s go, already!
How you can help: If you run a website and can filter traffic by user agent, get a list of the known AI scrapers agent strings and selectively redirect their requests to pre-generated AI slop. Regular visitors will see the content and the LLM scraper bots will scrape their own slop and, hopefully, train on it.
This would ideally become standardized among web servers with an option to easily block various automated aggregators.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on - social media, public image storage, copyrighted media, etc. All those sites with extensive privacy policies who are signing contracts to permit their content for training.
Without laws (and I’m not sure I support anything in this regard yet), I do not see AI progress slowing. Clearly inbreeding AI models has a similar effect as in nature. Fortunately there is enough original digital content out there that this does not need to happen.
Absolutely. It’s more a matter of principle for me. Kind of like the digital equivalent of leaving fake Amazon packages full of dog poo out front to make porch pirates have a bad day.
Well it means they need some ability to reject some content, which means they need a level of transparency they would never want otherwise.
They’ll just start using a chrome user agent
Only if enough people do it. Then again, loads scrapers outside of AI already pretend to be normal browsers.
You can validate that against user telemetry data expected from a browser.
AI already long ago stopped being trained on any old random stuff that came along off the web. Training data is carefully curated and processed these days. Much of it is synthetic, in fact.
These breathless articles about model collapse dooming AI are like discovering that the sun sets at night and declaring solar power to be doomed. The people working on this stuff know about it already and long ago worked around it.
Both can be true.
Preserved and curated datasets to train AI on, gathered before AI was mainstream. This has the disadvantage of being stuck in time, so-to-speak.
New datasets that will inevitably contain AI generated content, even with careful curation. So to take the other commenter’s analogy, it’s a shit sandwich that has some real ingredients, and doodoo smeared throughout.
They’re not both true, though. It’s actually perfectly fine for a new dataset to contain AI generated content. Especially when it’s mixed in with non-AI-generated content. It can even be better in some circumstances, that’s what “synthetic data” is all about.
The various experiments demonstrating model collapse have to go out of their way to make it happen, by deliberately recycling model outputs over and over without using any of the methods that real-world AI trainers use to ensure that it doesn’t happen. As I said, real-world AI trainers are actually quite knowledgeable about this stuff, model collapse isn’t some surprising new development that they’re helpless in the face of. It’s just another factor to include in the criteria for curating training data sets. It’s already a “solved” problem.
The reason these articles keep coming around is that there are a lot of people that don’t want it to be a solved problem, and love clicking on headlines that say it isn’t. I guess if it makes them feel better they can go ahead and keep doing that, but supposedly this is a technology community and I would expect there to be some interest in the underlying truth of the matter.
It’s kinda interesting in how it actually roughly parallels the dawn of the nuclear age in some specific ways. Namely, that there’s a clear “purity” line established by the advent of the technology - and I mean that literally, not figuratively. Content on the internet is going to have a very similar dividing line. But it’s also going to be way harder to definitively source data from before that line, unless someone clairvoyant happened to offline and archive a huge storage array with a complete internet snapshot right before ML made its public debut. And I know exactly what the scale of that storage commitment would be, and how much it would cost. So I’m certain nobody has done that.
Are there any good lists of known AI user agents? Ideally in a dependency repo so my server can get the latest values when the list is updated.
Okay but I like using perchance cus they dont profit off anything 👉👈
a large chunk of that site is some dudes lil hobby project and its kinda neat interacting with the community and seein how the code works. Its the only bot I’ll ever use cus they arent profiting off of other people shit. the only money they get is from ads and thats it.
Dont kill me with downvotes, I like making up cool OC concepts or poses n stuff and then drawing em.