A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.
Registration bypass: https://archive.is/3tEl0
The main angle is not to ‘poisen’ the training set. it is to waste time, energy and resources. the site loads deliberately slow and produces garbage, which has to be filtered out.
as i said: not a silver bullet. but at least some threads where tied up collecting garbage painfully slow. as the data is useless, whatever their cleanup process is, has more to do. or it might even be tricked into discarding the whole website, as the signal to noise ratio is bad.
so i would still say the author achieved his goal.
The site producing the nonsense has to produce lots of it any time a bot comes along, the trainers only have to filter it once. As others have pointed out it’s likely easy for an automated filter to spot. I don’t see it as being a clear win.