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And it's not even true, it's still the case that any time I try letting AI answer my searches for information when I'm googling it ends up in a conversation that's kinda "no, 2+2 = 4, not 5" "You're right! I done a booboo, 2+2 is indeed 4!" And it required me to have enough knowledge to spot it.

AI art still looks like garbage too. They just want it to be good enough to scam people

this sucks this sucks this sucks and I can't WAIT for it to die off for good

doofenshmirtz-evil-incorporated.com 😂

First I've heard of the Game UI Database, and it looks amazing! Too bad I only learned about it in the context of it being suffocated by AI scrapers. 😭

Another valuable cultural resource destroyed by LLMs.

kinda of wild to watch all the money in the world being spent to destroy the internet in realtime, punishing anyone who has contributed to it. even if we stop them, i am already pretty messed up about it

i know this is a serious post, and i shall not downplay the amount this sucks, but i cant be the only one that sees the comedy in using a Ratman pfp whilst posting anti ai, cause like, he would

Literal DDoS attacks, no way to just say "please don't" :/

No rules for the "special people" but somehow we are all expected to support their insanity financially.

and I thought millions of requests in a *month* on my site from AI scrapers was bad

We have that, there are a few pieces of software that can detect whether a request is probably from an AI scraper and serve it a labyrinth of nonsense pages. One of them is called iocaine.

can confirm first hand!

Wikipedia came to an agreement with some of the biggest players arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/w...

Its kinda hard to consider every angle of the damage caused by generative AI either through scraping or the generation itself. Theres just so many, nobody can be faulted for forgetting or not even knowing certain aspects of it all.

Trvthnvke

I'd be way less concerned if they were actually good at scraping websites. Hitting wiki sites is especially egregious, since a ton of them have archives you can grab all at once rather than hitting rendered pages every few seconds in perpetuity.

every library web site is struggling to deal with this right now.

Now the "solution" to this is to pay cloudflare for a service that directs bots away from the site, and that service costs more than twice as much as my hosting does - but without it, I can't have a website online with a small host. It'd force everyone onto the big providers' infrastructure.

THIS!!!

Someone just sent me a link to your TikTok! Thanks so much for what you said. I was very touched. And I have no idea who that comment was from, but I'm very flattered 😄

<3

Me when I write a scraper because I wanted a cool inventory app on my local system.

If only there were people able to do something about this who could act! *glares at US Congress/other world government bodies*

yeah i run a dinky niche web app, and in the last year, random nonsense hits against the API went from a few thousand a month to many, many millions per month. It's a huge strain, hurting both me and my users, and benefitting no one. I'm sure it's even worse for sites with actual popular content.

This has little to do with LLMs and everything to do with a lack of systemic consequences for using large computing power. We've been in an age where someone for very little money can buy time on giant networks and just ddos someone with no repercussions.

A very f you to all AI scraper devs

Just went to the website and it is still in "database unavailable" state. At this rate, the behavior of the crawler is no difference than a DDoS attack and should be illegal.

I thought DDoSing was illegal .. why do ai slop companies get a pass

Every day, a new hatred of "AI"

Was hoping that comments have solutions. What to do with that shit?

I wonder if requiring a sign in to see the content would help at least reduce the impact? along with blocking IP pools allocated to the companies running these things. Extra ball ache to set-up, but I'd not object to having to sign in to see the UI Database it's super useful

💯😔

Our University has to deal with repeated turn aways from our subsribed databases because it gets detected as bots and AI scraping. It's real world research and teaching being fucked in real time by techbro bullshit

Captcha challenges for anything even suspected of being a bot, it’s the only way to run public websites now. Let them come to you for an exception and agreed rate limit for their scraping.

Put redbean with blackholed in front of it and lock out for 24h whoever does too many requests. It can easily take millions req/s

Google at least used to do lightweight crawls, would've been massively complex to make search work. These crawlers OTOH behave like DDoS attacks and should be penalized with having their data centers seized and destroyed

its not legal and they dont care

This one in particular sadly isn't new. If you've got a service accessible over the web it's been hammered by bots looking for exploits for decades.

Privatised profits, socialised costs 🙂 Why pay to cache something when someone far less fortunate can pay for it instead

I didn't even consider this was a thing to do, but found a repo that just has a huge list of IP addresses from data centers to block. Need to set this myself.

A lot of AI projects hide crawlers behind residential proxies. It's not just malware anymore