Cloudflare Using Devilish Trick to Trap AI Scrapers in Infinite Maze of AI-Generated Content

The internet: a once wacky world of strange forums and obscure memes, a tool to harness the sum total of human knowledge at a moment's notice. At least, that was before AI slop ruined everything. To feed data-hungry AI models, companies and individuals are deploying a growing army of AI "web crawlers," bots tasked with sifting the internet for text, pictures, and other data. Once set loose, these bots bog down web servers, destroy search engines, and flood rival crawlers with AI babble. Thanks to these crawlers — or, more accurately, those holding their reins — once-real images are now lined up next to AI-generated goop, millions of websites are being whipped up by robots, for robots, and social media is a sloppified shell of its former self. Though well-funded publishers are resorting to shady backroom deals to keep their sites clean, there's very little the rest of us can do to resist the AI hoards. Thankfully, one company is standing up against the AI onslaught. The network plat ... Read full article.