Website operators are being asked to feed LLM crawlers poisoned data by a project called Poison Fountain.
The project page links to URLs which provide a practically endless stream of poisoned training data. They have determined that this approach is very effective at ultimately sabotaging the quality and accuracy of AI which has been trained on it.
Small quantities of poisoned training data can significantly damage a language model.
The page also gives suggestions on how to put the provided resources to use.
Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.
If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.
At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.