Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem

It'd say it's more like a honeypot for bots. So pretty similar objectives.

This is honeypot. The author, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Levine, keeps it just to notice any new (significant) scraping operation launched that will invariably hit his little farm and let be seen in the logs. He's well known anti-spam operative with his various efforts now dating back multiple decades.

Notice how he casually drops a link to the landing page in the NANOG message. That's how the bots will get a bait.

I recognize the name John Levine at iecc.com, "Invincible Electric Calculator Company," from web 1.0 era. He was the moderator of the Usenet comp.compilers newsgroup and wrote the first C compiler for the IBM PC RT

https://compilers.iecc.com/

It's for shits-and-giggles and it's doing its job really well right now. Not everything needs to have an economic purpose, 100 trackers, ads and backed by a company.

I wonder how much the source content is the cause of hallucinations rather than anything inherent to LLMs. I mean if someone posts a question on an internet forum that I don't know the answer to, I'm certainly not going to post "I don't know" since that wouldn't be useful.

In fact, in general, in any non one-on-one conversation the answer "I don't know" is not useful because if you don't know in a group, your silence indicates that.

During tokenization, the usernames became tokens... but before training the actual model, they removed stuff like that from the training data, so it was never trained on text which contains those tokens. As such, it ended up with tokens which weren't associated with anything; glitch tokens.

More glitch token discussion over at Computerphile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA

The end state of training on web text has always been an ouroboros - primarily because of adtech incentives to produce low quality content at scale to capture micro pennies.

The irony of the whole thing is brutal.

Well it will be multimodal, training and inferring on feeds of distributed sensing networks; radio, optical, acoustic, accelerometer, vibration, anything that's in your phone and much besides. I think the time of the text-only transformer has already passed.

Eventually, OpenAI (and friends) are going to be training their models on almost exclusively AI generated content

What makes you think this is true? Yes, it's likely that the internet will have more AI generated content than real content eventually (if it hasn't happened already), but why do you think AI companies won't realize this and adjust their training methods?

The only way out of this is robots that can go out in the world and collect data. Write in natural language what they observed which can then be used to train better LLMs.

It's true that there will no longer be any virgin forest to scrape but it's also true that content humans want will still be most popular and promoted and curated and edited etc etc. Even if it's impossible to train on organic content it'll still be possible to get good content

Is it (I am not a worker in this space, so genuine question)?

My thoughts - I teach myself all the time. Self reflection with a loss function can lead to better results. Why can't the LLMs do the same (I grasp that they may not be programmed that way currently)? Top engines already do it with chess, go, etc. They exceed human abilities without human gameplay. To me that seems like the obvious and perhaps only route to general intelligence.

We as humans can recognize botnets. Why wouldn't the LLM? Sort of in a hierarchal boost - learn the language, learn about bots and botnets (by reading things like this discussion), learn to identify them, learn that their content doesn't help the loss function much, etc. I mean sure, if the main input is "as a language model I cannot..." and that is treated as 'gospel' that would lead to a poor LLM, but i don't think that is the future. LLMs are interacting with humans - how many times do they have to re-ask a question - that should be part of the learning/loss function. How often do they copy the text into their clipboard (weak evidence that the reply was good)? do you see that text in the wild, showing it was used? If so, in what context "Witness this horrible output of chatGPT: <blah>" should result in lower scores and suppression of that kind of thing.

I dream of the day where I have a local LLM (ie individualized, I don't care where the hardware is) as a filter on my internet. Never see a botnet again, or a stack overflow q/a that is just "this has already been answered" (just show me where it was answered), rewrite things to fix grammar, etc. We already have that with automatic translation of languages in your browser, but now we have the tools for something more intelligent than that. That sort of thing. Of course there will be an arms race, but in one sense who cares. If a bot is entirely indistinguishable from a person, is that a difference that matters? I can think of scenerios where the answer is an emphatic YES, but overall it seems like a net improvement.

Web scraping the public Internet is legal, at least in the U.S.

hiQ's public scraping of LinkedIn was ruled to be within their rights and not a violation of the CFAA. I imagine that's why LinkedIn has almost everything behind an auth wall now.

Scraping auth-walled data is different. When you sign up, you have to check "I agree to the terms," and the terms generally say, "You can't scrape us." So, you can't just make a million bot accounts that take an app's data (legally, anyway). Those EULAs are generally legally enforceable in the U.S.

Some sites have terms at the bottom that prohibit scraping—but my understanding is that those aren't generally enforceable if the user doesn't have to take any action to accept or acknowledge them.

There’s currently only one situation where scraping is almost definitely “not legal”:

If the information you’re scraping requires a login, and if in order to get a login you have to agree to a terms of service, and that terms of service forbids you from scraping — then you could have a bad day in civil court if the website you’re scraping decides to sue you.

If the data is publicly accessible without a login then scraping is 99% safe with no legal issues, even if you ignore robots.txt. You might still end up in court if you found a way to correctly guess non-indexed URLs[0] but you’d probably prevail in the end (…probably).

The “purpose” of robots.txt is to let crawlers know what they can do without getting ip-banned by the website operator that they’re scraping. Generally crawlers that ignore robots.txt and also act more like robots than humans, will get an IP ban.

0: https://www.troyhunt.com/enumerationis-enumerating-resources...

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that scraping publicly accessible content on the internet is legal.

If you publish something on a publicly served internet page, you're essentially broadcasting it to the world. You're putting something on a server which specifically communicates the bits and bytes of your media to the person requesting it without question.

You have every right to put whatever sort of barrier you'd like on the server, such as a sign in, a captcha, a puzzle, a cryptographic software key exchange mechanism, and so on. You could limit the access rights to people named Sam, requiring them to visit a particular real world address to provide notarized documentation confirming their identity in exchange for a unique 2fa fob and credentials for secure access (call it The Sams Club, maybe?)

If you don't put up a barrier, and you configure the server to deliver the content without restriction, or put your content on a server configured as such, then you are implicitly authorizing access to your content.

Little popups saying "by visiting this site, you agree to blah blah blah" are not valid. Courts made the analogy to a "gate-up/gate-down" mechanism. If you have a gate down, you can dictate the terms of engagement with your server and content. If you don't have a gate down, you're giving your content to whoever requests it.

You have control over the information you put online. You can choose which services and servers you upload to and interact with. Site operators and content producers can't decide that their intent or consent be withdrawn after the fact, as once something is published and served, the only restrictions on the scraper are how they use the information in turn.

Someone who's archived or scraped publicly served data can do whatever they want with the content within established legal boundaries. They can rewrite all the AP news articles with their own name as author, insert their name as the hero in all fanfic stories they download, and swap out every third word for "bubblegum" if they want. They just can't publish or serve that content, in turn, unless it meets the legal standards for fair use. Other exceptions to copyright apply, in educational, archival, performance, accessibility, and certain legal conditions such as First Sale doctrine. Personal use of such media is effectively unlimited.

The legality of web scraping is not disputed in the US. Other countries have some silly ideas about post-hoc "well that's not what I meant" legal mumbo jumbo designed to assist politicians and rich people in whitewashing their reputations and pulling information offline using legal threats.

Aside from right to be forgotten inanity, content on the internet falls under the same copyright rules as books, magazines, or movies published on physical media. If Disney set up a stall at San Francisco city hall with copies of the Avengers movies on a thumb drive in a giant box saying "free, take one!", this would be roughly the same as publishing those movie files to a public Disney web page. The gate would be up. (The way they have it set up in real life, with their streaming services and licensed media access, the gate is down.)

So - leaving behind the legality of redistribution of content, there's no restriction on web scraping public content, because the content was served intentionally to the software or entity that visited the site. It's up to the server operator to put barriers in place and to make content private. It's not rocket surgery, but platforms want to have their cake and eat it too, with control over publicly accessible content that isn't legal or practical.

Twitter/X is a good example of impractical control, since the site has effectively become useless spam without signing in. Platforms have to play by the same rules as everyone else. If the gate is up, the content is fair game for scraping. The Supreme Court gave the decision to a lower court, who affirmed the gate up/gate down test for legality of access to content.

Since Google and other major corporations have a vested interest in the internet remaining open and free, and their search engines and other tech are completely dependent on the gate up/gate down status quo, it's unlikely that the law will change any time soon.

Tl;dr: Anything publicly served is legal to scrape. Microsoft attempted to sue someone for scraping LinkedIn, but the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of access. If Microsoft's lawyers and money can't impede scraping, it's likely nobody will ever mount an effective challenge, and the gating doctrine is effectively the law of the land.

Scraping publicly available data from websites is no different from web browsing, period. Companies stating otherwise in their T&Cs are a joke. Copyright infringement is a different game.

> It’s strange that OpenAI has created a ~$80B company (or whatever it is) using data gathered via scraping

Like Google and many others.

Why would it not be legal? Was there a law passed that makes it illegal?

The issue often isn't the scraping, it is often how you use the information scraped afterwards. A lot of scraping is done with no reference to any licensing information the sites being read might publish, hence image making AI models having regurgitated chunks of scraped stock images complete with watermarks. Though the scraping itself can count as a DoS if done aggressively enough.

Scraping is legal. Always has been, always will be. Mainly because there's some fuzz around the edges of the definition. Is a web browser a scraper? It does a lot of the same things.

IIRC LinkedIn/Microsoft was trying to sue a company based on Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations, claiming they were accessing information they were not allowed to. Courts ruled that that was bullshit. You can't put up a website and say "you can only look at this with your eyes". Recently-ish, they were found to be in violation of the User Agreement.

So as long as you don't have a user account with the site in question or the site does not have a User Agreement prohibiting scraping, you're golden.

The problem isn't the scraping anyway, it's the reproduction of the work. In that case, it really does matter how you acquired the material and what rights you have with regards use of that material.

I think he's saying that it's not a problem for him, but for OpenAI?

Before someone tells me to fix my robots.txt, this is a content farm so rather than being one web site with 6,859,000,000 pages, it is 6,859,000,000 web sites each with one page.

Based on the page footer ("IECC ChurnWare") I believe this is a site by design to waste time for web crawlers and tools which try to get root access on every domain. The robots.txt looks like this: https://ulysses-antoine-kurtis.web.sp.am/robots.txt

I don't see how this does much to keep bad actors away from other domains, but I can see why they don't want to give up the game for OpenAI to stop crawling.

What exactly is this website? I don’t get it…

I’d let them do their thing, why not?!

Because he doesn't want to give away something of value for free?

Clearly it has value, or OpenAI wouldn't be scraping the content.

This is the real internet.

No, this is billion-dollar companies Hoovering up everything and renting the results to the unwashed masses.

It looks like he doesn’t really care that much that they’re retrieving millions of pages

If he didn't care, he wouldn't have asked for a way to let OpenAI know its crawler is broken.

Some scrapers respect robots.txt. OpenAI doesn't. SP is just informing the world at large of this fact.

> It looks like he doesn’t really care that much that they’re retrieving millions of pages

It impacts the performance for the other legitimate users of that web farm ;)

The CTO isn't even aware of where the data is coming from (allegedly).

Arachnid here… What am I looking at? The intent is to waste the resources of crawlers by just making the web larger?

I don't think this message is about "protecting the site's data" quite so much as "hey guys, you're wasting a ton of time and network connect to make your model worse. Might wanna do something 'bout that"

The entire purpose of this website is to identify bad actors who do not respect robots.txt, so that they can be publicly shamed.

No. I've run 'bot motels myself. I've got better things to do than curating a block list when they can just switch or renumber their infrastructure. Most notably I ran a 'bot motel on a compute-intensive web app; it was cheaper to burn bandwidth (and I slow-rolled that) than CPU cycles. Poisoning the datasets was just lulz.

I block ping from virtually all of Amazon; there are a few providers out there for which I block every naked SYN coming to my environment except port 25, and a smattering I block entirely. I can't prove that the pings even come from Amazon, even if the pongs are supposed to go there (although I have my suspicions that even if the pings don't come from the host receiving the pongs the pongs are monitored by the generator of the pings).

The point I'm making is that e.g. Amazon doesn't have the right to sell access to my compute and tragedy of the commons applies, folks. I offered them a live feed of the worst offenders, but all they want is pcaps.

(I've got a list of 50 prefixes, small enough to be a separate specialty firewall table. It misses a few things and picks up some dust bunnies. But contrast that to the 8,000 prefixes they publish in that JSON file. Spoiler alert: they won't admit in that JSON file that they own the entirety of 3.0.0.0/8. I'm willing to share the list TLP:RED/YELLOW, hunt me down and introduce yourself.)

Might one day come looking for who lobotomized it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

Old name for a web crawler / search indexer

If you're not walling off your content behind a login that contains terms that you agree to not scraping, then, scraping that site is 100% legal. Robots.txt isn't a legal document.

It's not just a problem for training, but the end user, too. There are so many times that I've tried to ask a question or request a summary for a long article only to be told it can't read it itself, so you have to copy-paste the text into the chat. Given the non-binding nature of robots.txt and the way they seem comfortable with vacuuming up public data in other contexts, I'm surprised they allow it to be such an obstacle for the user experience.

Single handedly extending the lifespan of all humans by however long it takes them to crawl 6,859,000,000 pages.

That's an interesting attack vector, isn't it?

So someone could hypothetically perform a Microsoft-Tay-style attack against OpenAI models using an infinite Potemkin subdomians generated on the fly on a $20 VPS? One could hypothetically use GenAI to create the biased pages with repeated calls on how it'd be great to JOIN THE NAVY on 27,000 different "subdomains"

And assign such content double weight in training ..