Whack-a-mole

Yes, I’m going to rant about generative AI again.

I run a few hobby sites, the most popular one being Find a pinball, a place where people can find and share places to play pinball around Europe.

For the past week it’s been absolutely hammered by AI scrapers, I’m talking several hundred thousand requests per hour.

They visit looking like ordinary browsers, often coming from residential IP addresses (your smart TV might even be a source, they rent capacity on them). Each one requests a single page. Despite that, there can be several hundred of them reading that single page at the same time. The tell is that they’re sharing a session cookie, something real users wouldn’t do.

For the most part, they get blocked automatically after a while and, luckily, my server is over-dimensioned and can take the beating. That’s not the case for many other sites.

These people are hoovering up everyone’s work and pushing the cost onto the creators themselves. I’m lucky, but I’ve heard of sites going down, heavy bandwidth bills, and plenty of other related externalities. I’m wasting time implementing defences, for example. Many people I know have just stopped publishing; why write for a bot?

Generative AI is a parasitic product that is sawing the branch it’s sitting on. It’ll make a few people extremely rich and everyone else poorer; financially, intellectually, and culturally.

I don’t expect this to change behaviours. There are plenty of precedents with self-destructive activities and lack of long term outlook (climate change, anyone?). But I’m putting it out there anyway.

Colin

PS: Can you tell I just spent several hours fighting this slop show?