• palordrolap@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    Put something in robots.txt that isn’t supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

    Imperfect, but can’t think of a better solution.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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      7 months ago

      Good old honeytrap. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s doable.

      Have a honeytrap page somewhere in your website. Make sure that legit users won’t access it. Disallow crawling the honeytrap page through robots.txt.

      Then if some crawler still accesses it, you could record+ban it as you said… or you could be even nastier and let it do so. Fill the honeytrap page with poison - nonsensical text that would look like something that humans would write.

      • CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it’s still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.

        Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.

        I’d love to see something similar with robots.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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          7 months ago

          Yup, it’s the same approach as email spam traps. Except the naughty list, but… holy fuck a shareable bot IP list is an amazing addition, it would increase the damage to those web crawling businesses.

      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        I’m the idiot human that digs through robots.txt and the site map to see things that aren’t normally accessible by an end user.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, this is a pretty classic honeypot method. Basically make something available but inaccessible to the normal user. Then you know anyone who accesses it is not a normal user.

      I’ve even seen this done with Steam achievements before; There was a hidden game achievement which was only available via hacking. So anyone who used hacks immediately outed themselves with a rare achievement that was visible on their profile.

      • Link@rentadrunk.org
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        7 months ago

        That’s a bit annoying as it means you can’t 100% the game as there will always be one achievement you can’t get.

    • Aatube@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      robots.txt is purely textual; you can’t run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn’t intend to follow robots.txt wouldn’t query it.

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        If it doesn’t get queried that’s the fault of the webscraper. You don’t need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:

        here-there-be-dragons.html
        

        Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn’t pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.

      • ShitpostCentral@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You’re second point is a good one, but you absolutely can log the IP which requested robots.txt. That’s just a standard part of any http server ever, no JavaScript needed.

        • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          You’d probably have to go out of your way to avoid logging this. I’ve always seen such logs enabled by default when setting up web servers.

  • 𝐘Ⓞz҉@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.

    • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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      7 months ago

      Why not blame the companies ? After all they are the ones that are doing it, not the boomer politicians.

      And in the long term they are the ones that risk to be “punished”, just imagine people getting tired of this shit and starting to block them at a firewall level…

      • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        Because the politicians also created the precedent that anything you can get away with, goes. They made the game, defined the objective, and then didn’t adapt quickly so that they and their friends would have a shot at cheating.

        There is absolutely no narrative of “what can you do for your country” anymore. It’s been replaced by the mottos of “every man for himself” and “get while the getting’s good”.

    • Dr_Satan@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      I think that good behavior is implicitly mandated even if there’s nobody to punish you if you don’t.

  • YTG123@feddit.ch
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    7 months ago

    We need laws mandating respect of robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuff

    • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      7 months ago

      It’s a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Turning that into a law is ridiculous - you really can’t consider that more than advisory unless you enforce it with technical means. For example, maybe put it behind a login or captcha if you want only humans to see it

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Yes, and there’s also no law against calling an unlisted phone number

          Also we already had this battle with robots.txt. In the beginning, search engines wouldn’t honor it either because they wanted the competitive advantage of more info, and websites trusted it too much and tried to wall off too much info that way.

          There were complaints, bad pr, lawsuits, call for a law

          It’s no longer the Wild West:

          • search engines are mature and generally honor robots.txt
          • websites use rate limiting to conserve resources and user logins to fence off data there’s a reason to fence off
          • truce: neither side is as greedy
          • there is no such law nor is that reasonable
      • SPRUNT@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The battle cry of conservatives everywhere: It’s too hard!

        Except if it involves oppressing minorities and women. Then it’s a moral imperative worth all the time and money you can shovel at it regardless of whether the desired outcome is realistic or not.

        • Jojo@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Seriously, could the party of “small government” get out of my business, please?

            • Jojo@lemm.ee
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              7 months ago

              I just wish the push and pull of politics didn’t have to be played as a zero sum game. I wish someone could take the initiative and just…

              I think both parties in America sing pretty loud about “law and order.” I haven’t heard that cry particularly loudly from either side over the other. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone who claims to be a Democrat saying the end goal is “small government” but I have heard it from Republican voices.

              Honestly, I would really prefer if we were in a system that enabled more parties, so we didn’t have “parties” that did such contradictory things as the current ones…

              • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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                7 months ago

                The GOP has historically been the party of law and order. Hence why they implied that blue lives matter more than black lives.

                thatsthejoke.png

                Just like how one party impeached a president of the other for obstruction and abuse of power, and the other impeached a president for checks notes lying about a blowjob.

    • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      Sounds like the type of thing that would either be unenforceable or profitable to violate compared to the fines.

    • wabafee@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I hope not, laws tend to get outdated real fast. Who knows robots.txt might not even be used in the future and it just there adding space because of law reasons.

      • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        robots.txt has been an unofficial standard for 30 years and its augmented with sitemap.xml to help index uncrawlable pages, and Schema.org to expose contents for Semantic Web. I’m not stating it shouldn’t not be a law, but to suggest changing norms as a reason is a pretty weak counterargument, man.

      • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        robots.txt is a 30 year old standard. If we can write common sense laws around things like email and VoIP, we can do it for web standards too.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        We don’t need new laws we just need enforcement of existing laws. It is already illegal to copy copyrighted content, it’s just that the AI companies do it anyway and no one does anything about it.

        Enforcing respect for robots.txt doesn’t matter because the AI companies are already breaking the law.

        • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          I think the issue is that existing laws don’t clearly draw a line that AI can cross. New laws may very well be necessary if you want any chance at enforcement.

          And without a law that defines documents like robots.txt as binding, enforcing respect for it isn’t “unnecessary”, it is impossible.

          I see no logic in complaining about lack of enforcement while actively opposing the ability to meaningfully enforce.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            7 months ago

            Copyright law in general needs changing though that’s the real problem. I don’t see the advantage of legally mandating that a hacky workaround solution becomes a legally mandated requirement.

            Especially because there are many many legitimate reasons to ignore robots.txt including it being misconfigured or it just been set up for search engines when your bot isn’t a search engine crawler.

      • Tyfud@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You can describe the law in a similar way to a specification, and you can make it as broad as needed. Something like the file name shouldn’t ever come up as an issue.

        • GhostMatter@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          The law can be broad with allowances to define specifics by decree, executive order or the equivalent.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

    Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that’s why things seem so much worse now.

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Governments could do something about it, if they weren’t overwhelmed by bullshit from bullshit generators instead and lead by people driven by their personal wealth.

    • PatMustard@feddit.uk
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      7 months ago

      these days

      When, at any point in history, have people acknowledged that there was no social change or disruption and everyone was happy?

  • moitoi@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    Alternative title: Capitalism doesn’t care about morals and contracts. It wants to make more money.

    • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Exactly. Capitalism spits in the face of the concept of a social contract, especially if companies themselves didn’t write it.

      • WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Capitalism, at least, in a lassie-faire marketplace, operates on a social contract, fiat money is an example of this. The market decides, the people decide. Are there ways to amass a certain amount of money to make people turn blind eyes? For sure, but all systems have their ways to amass power, no matter what

        • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          I’d say that historical evidence directly contradicts your thesis. Were it factual, times of minimal regulation would be times of universal prosperity. Instead, they are the time of robber-barons, company scrip that must be spent in company stores, workers being massacred by hired thugs, and extremely disparate distribution of wealth.

          No. Laissez-faire capitalism has only ever consistently benefitted the already wealthy and sociopaths happy to ignore social contact for their own benefit.

          • WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            You said “a social contract”. Capitalism operates on one. “The social contract” as you presumably intend to use it here is different. Yes, capitalism allows those with money to generate money, but a disproportionate distribution of wealth is not violation of a social contract. I’m not arguing for deregulation, FAR from it, but the social contract is there. If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.

              Unfortunately, this is not generally the case. In the US, for example, the corporation merely engages in legalized bribery to ensure that people are dependent upon it (ex. limiting healthcare access, erosion of social safety nets) and don’t have a choice but to work for them or die. Disproportionate distribution of wealth may not by itself be a violation of social contact but if gives the wealthy extreme leverage to use in coercing those who are not wealthy and further eroding protections against bad actors. This has been shown historically to be a self-reinforcing cycle that requires that the wealthy be forced to stop.

              • WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Yes, regulations should be in place, but the “legalized bribery” isn’t forcing people, it’s just easier to stick with the status quo than change it. They aren’t forced to die, it’s just a lot of work to not. The social contract is there, it’s just one we don’t like

    • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      Capitalism is a concept, it can’t care if it wanted and it even can’t want to begin with. It’s the humans. You will find greedy, immoral ones in every system and they will make it miserable for everyone else.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Capitalism is the widelly accepted self-serving justification of those people for their acts.

        The real problem is in the “widelly accepted” part: a sociopath killing an old lady and justifying it because “she looked funny at me” wouldn’t be “widelly accepted” and Society would react in a suitable way, but if said sociopath scammed the old lady’s pension fund because (and this is a typical justification in Investment Banking) “the opportunity was there and if I didn’t do it somebody else would’ve, so better be me and get the profit”, it’s deemed “acceptable” and Society does not react in a suitable way.

        Mind you, Society (as in, most people) might actually want to react in a suitable way, but the structures in our society are such that the Official Power Of Force in our countries is controlled by a handful of people who got there with crafty marketing and backroom plays, and those deem it “acceptable”.

        • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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          7 months ago

          People will always find justification to be asholes. Capitalism tried to harvest that energy and unleashed it’s full potential, with rather devastating consequences.

          • Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Sure, but think-structures matter. We could have a system that doesn’t reward psychopathic business choices (as much), while still improving our lives bit by bit. If the system helps a bit with making the right choices, that would matter a lot.

            • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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              7 months ago

              That’s basically what I wrote, (free) market economy especially in combination with credit based capitalism gives those people a perfect combination of a system to thrive in. This seems to result in very fast progress and immense wealth, which is not distributed very equally. Than again, I prefer Besos and Zuckerberg as CEOs rather than politicians or warlords. Dudes with big Egos and Ambitions need something productive to work on.

        • Katana314@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It’s deemed “acceptable”? A sociopath scamming an old lady’s pension is basically the “John Wick’s dog” moment that leads to the insane death-filled warpath in recent movie The Beekeeper.

          This is the kind of edgelord take that routinely expects worse than the worst of society with no proof to their claims.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            This is the kind of shit I saw from the inside in Investment Banking before and after the 2008 Crash.

            None of those assholes ever gets prison time for the various ways in which they abuse markets and even insider info for swindeling amongst other Pension Funds, so de facto the Society we have with the power structures it has, accepts it.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Well the trump era has shown that ignoring social contracts and straight up crime are only met with profit and slavish devotion from a huge community of dipshits. So. Y’know.

    • Ithi@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Only if you’re already rich or in the right social circles though. Everyone else gets fined/jail time of course.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    hmm, i though websites just blocked crawler traffic directly? I know one site in particular has rules about it, and will even go so far as to ban you permanently if you continually ignore them.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      There are more crawlers than I have fucks to give, you’ll be in a pissing match forever. robots.txt was supposed to be the norm to tell crawlers what they can and cannot access. Its not on you to block them. Its on them, and its sadly a legislative issues at this point.

      I wish it wasn’t, but legislative fixes are always the most robust and complied against.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        yes but also there’s a point where it’s blatantly obvious. And i can’t imagine it’s hard to get rid of the obviously offending ones. Respectful crawlers are going to be imitating humans, so who cares, disrespectful crawlers will ddos your site, that can’t be that hard to implement.

        Though if we’re talking “hey please dont scrape this particular data” Yeah nobody was ever respecting that lol.

        • T156@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Except that it’d also catch out people who use accessibility devices might see the link anyways, or use the keyboard to navigate a site instead of a mouse.

          • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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            7 months ago

            i don’t know, maybe there’s a canvas trick. i’m not a webdev so i am a bit out of my depth and mostly guessing and remembering 20-year-old technology

        • oatscoop@midwest.social
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          7 months ago

          If it weren’t so difficult and require so much effort, I’d rather clicking the link cause the server to switch to serving up poisoned data – stuff that will ruin a LLM.

          • T156@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Would that be effective? A lot of poisoning seems targeted to a specific version of an LLM, rather than being general.

            Like how the image poisoning programs only work for some image generators and not others.

          • HelloHotel@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Visiting /enter_spoopmode.html will choose a theme and mangle the text for any page you next go to accordingly (think search&replace with swear words or santa clause)

            It will also show a banner letting the user know they are in spoop mode, with a javascript button to exit the mode, where the AJAX request URL is ofuscated (think base64) The banner is at the bottom of the html document (not nesisarly the screen itself) and/or inside unusual/normally ignored tags. <script type="spoop/text" style='display:block">you are in spoop mode</script>

            Or have a secret second page that is only followed if you ignore robots.txt /spoop_post/yvlhcigcigc is a clone of /post/yvlhcigcigc in ‘spoop mode’

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        last i checked humans dont access every page on a website nearly simultaneously…

        And if you imitate a human then honestly who cares.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        i mean yeah, but at a certain point you just have to accept that it’s going to be crawled. The obviously negligent ones are easy to block.

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        robots.txt is a file available in a standard location on web servers (example.com/robots.txt) which set guidelines for how scrapers should behave.

        That can range from saying “don’t bother indexing the login page” to “Googlebot go away”.

        IT’s also in the first paragraph of the article.

      • mrnarwall@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Robots.txt is a file that is is accessible as part of an http request. It’s a backend configuration file that sets rules for what automatically running web crawlers are allowed. It can set both who is and who isn’t allowed. Google is usually the most widely allowed domain for bots just because their crawler is how they find websites for search results. But it’s basically the honor system. You could write a scraper today that goes to websites that it is being told it doesn’t have permission to view this page, ignore it, and still get the information

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          I do not think it is even part of the HTTP protocol I think it’s just a pseudo add-on. It’s barely even a protocol it’s basically just a page that bots can look at with no really pre-agreed syntax.

          If you want to make a bot that doesn’t respect robots.txt you don’t even need to do anything complicated, you just need to not include the requirement to look at the page. It’s not enforceable at all.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Most every other social contract has been violated already. If they don’t ignore robots.txt, what is left to violate?? Hmm??

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s almost as if leaving things to social contracts vs regulating them is bad for the layperson… 🤔

      Nah fuck it. The market will regulate itself! Tax is theft and I don’t want that raise or I’ll get in a higher tax bracket and make less!

      • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        This can actually be an issue for poor people, not because of tax brackets but because of income-based assistance cutoffs. If $1/hr raise throws you above those cutoffs, that extra $160 could cost you $500 in food assistance, $5-$10/day for school lunch, or get you kicked out of government subsidied housing.

        Yet another form of persecution that the poor actually suffer and the rich pretend to.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    I explicitly have my robots.txt set to block out AI crawlers, but I don’t know if anyone else will observe the protocol. They should have tools I can submit a sitemap.xml against to know if i’ve been parsed. Until they bother to address this, I can only assume their intent is hostile and if anyone is serious about building a honeypot and exposing the tooling for us to deploy at large, my options are limited.

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      The funny (in an “wtf” not “haha” sense) thing is, individuals such as security researchers have been charged under digital trespassing laws for stuff like accessing publicly available ststems and changing a number in the URL in order to get access to data that normally wouldn’t, even after doing responsible disclosure.

      Meanwhile, companies completely ignore the standard mentions to say “you are not allowed to scape this data” and then use OUR content/data to build up THEIR datasets, including AI etc.

      That’s not a “violation of a social contract” in my book, that’s violating the terms of service for the site and essentially infringement on copyright etc.

      No consequences for them though. Shit is fucked.

      • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Corporations are people except when it comes to liability. Compare the consequences of stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud vs. stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud as an LLC.

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.

    if exists("/robots.txt"):
        no it fucking doesn't
    
    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don’t waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It’s there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.

  • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 “robots.txt is a social contract” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤡

    • Adanisi@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      If you have something to say, actually explain it instead of the obnoxious emoji spam.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You’re too stupid to get it from an emoji. why would I waste the time.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        7 months ago

        It’s completely off-topic, but you know 4chan filters? Like, replacing “fam” with “senpai” and stuff like this?

        So. It would be damn great if Lemmy had something similar. Except that it would replace emojis, “lol” and “lmao” with “I’m braindead.”

      • mark@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        This seems to interestingly prove the point made by the person this is in reply to. Breaking laws come with consequences. Not caring about a robots.txt file doesn’t. But maybe it should.

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          My angle was more about all rules being social contructs, and said rules being important for the continued operation of society, but that’s a good angle too.

          Lots of laws don’t come with real punishments either, especially if you have money. We can change this too.

  • masonlee@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Also, by the way, violating a basic social contract to not work towards triggering an intelligence explosion that will likely replace all biological life on Earth with computronium, but who’s counting? :)

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called “AI” today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don’t worry, we’re not heading for the singularity.

        • lunarul@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          https://www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012

          Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies

          Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

          As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.

          Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works

          Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.

          https://www.itu.int/en/journal/001/Documents/itu2018-9.pdf

          AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date

          • masonlee@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Ah, I understand you now. You don’t believe we’re close to AGI. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re moving at an incredible clip; AGI is the stated goal of the big AI players. Many experts think we are probably just one or two breakthroughs away. You’ve seen the surveys on timelines? Years to decades. Seems wise to think ahead to its implications rather than dismiss its possibility.

            • lunarul@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.

              • masonlee@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Before Deep Learning recently shifted the AI computing paradigm, I would have written exactly what you wrote. But as of late, the opinion that we need yet another type of hardware to surpass human intelligence seems increasingly rare. Multimodal generative AI is already pretty general. To count as AGI for you, you would like to see the addition of continuous learning and agentification? (Or are you looking for “consciousness”?)

                That said, I’m all for a new paradigm, and favor Russell’s “provably beneficial AI” approach!

                • lunarul@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.

                  Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

                  What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.

            • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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              7 months ago

              This is like saying putting logs on a fire is “one or two breakthroughs away” from nuclear fusion.

              LLMs do not have anything in common with intelligence. They do not resemble intelligence. There is no path from that nonsense to intelligence. It’s a dead end, and a bad one.

    • tiltinyall@lemmy.org
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      7 months ago

      I remember early Zuckerberg comments that put me onto just how douchey corporations could be about exploiting a new resource.

    • glukoza@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      Ah, AI doesn’t pose as danger in that way. It’s danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.

      • lunarul@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.

        But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)

        • glukoza@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          It replaced content writers, replacing digital artists, replacing programmers. In a sense they fire unexeprieced ones because ai speeds up those with more experience.

          • lunarul@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.

            For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

            But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

            So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

            The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

        • glukoza@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          Yeah I’m not for UBI that much, and don’t see anyone working towards global VAT. I was comparing that worry about AI that is gonna destroy humanity is not possible, it’s just scifi.

          • masonlee@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Seven years ago I would have told you that GPT-4 was sci fi, and I expect you would have said the same, as would have most every AI researcher. The deep learning revolution came as a shock to most. We don’t know when the next breakthrough will be towards agentification, but given the funding now, we should expect soon. Anyways, if you’re ever interested to learn more about unsolved fundamental AI safety problems, the book “Human Compatible” by Stewart Russell is excellent. Also “Uncontrollable” by Darren McKee just came out (I haven’t read it yet) and is said to be a great introduction to the bigger fundamental risks. A lot to think about; just saying I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Cheers.

        • glukoza@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          Fair point, but AI is part of it, I mean it exists in capitalist system. This AI Singularity apocalypse is like not gonna happen in 99%, AI within capitalism will affect us badly.

    • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      If it makes you feel any better, my bet is still on nuclear holocaust or complete ecological collapse resulting from global warming to be our undoing. Given a choice, I’d prefer nuclear holocaust. Feels less protracted. Worst option is weaponized microbes or antibiotic resistant bacteria. That’ll take foreeeever.

      • masonlee@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        100%. Autopoietic computronium would be a “best case” outcome, if Earth is lucky! More likely we don’t even get that before something fizzles. “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” is a good paper to read.