Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.
Man do I hate the age we live in now, where people are actively having to declare war on scrapers like this because AI bros have literally zero respect towards the rest of the internet.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Right! This isn’t “AI going rogue”, it’s software agents made and employed by perfectly human psychopaths, doing what they were made to do.
Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze’s owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.
I’m afraid to ask about the energy footprint. But what the heck, what do we know about it?
What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.
That’s exactly what Iocaine does.