From The Register:
Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content
Slop-making machine will feed unauthorized scrapers what they so richly deserve, hopefully without poisoning the internet (author: bit worried about the “hopefully”-part).
“In reality crawler operators ignore the instructions in robots.txt files, or work around CAPTCHAs and web server settings. The result is a lot of unwanted crawler traffic consuming resources, and info fed into training data without creators’ permission – a contentious practice currently being tested in court amidst allegations of copyright abuse.
No human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense.
Cloudflare’s response is to let crawler bots in and use generative AI to create junk content for them to devour in what the company has termed an “AI Labyrinth”.”
