Digital Activists Code Tarpits to Trap and Poison AI

IonOtter writes: Digital activists, skirting the edge of the law, are coding web-based "tarpits" that not only trap unscrupulous AI in an endless loop, the malicious code causes the AI to become hopelessly contaminated with useless gibberish.

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models.