Here’s a video from MattKC who is a good technical YouTuber who’s website got shut down because the TikTok companies webcrawler just kept sending requests and took up bandwidth. Very cool vid and channel, highly recommend! https://youtu.be/Hi5sd3WEh0c
There it begins. Nothing good will ever come form this.
No it won’t. Media already laid the groundwork for people to hate on AI. Now they will keep focus on areas where when you read it we all come to the same common sense legislation solution. Then will come a bill to strip us of more things that made the internet awesome and we will cheer. Web scrapping and data sharing can fuck off. Pirates sent to North Korean prison camps. Sharing accounts with family, you’re flagged for an audit. Nintendo modders, more like criminals.
As for what ByteDance plans to do with a new LLM, a person familiar with the company’s ambitions said one goal has to do with the search function for TikTok.
Last week, TikTok released an update to its current search function focused on [keywords for ads], basically allowing advertisers to search in real time for words that are trending on TikTok. It allows marketers to build an ad with relevant keywords that would ostensibly help the ad show up on the screens of more users.
…
“Given the audience and the amount of use, TikTok with a search environment that is a completely biddable space with keywords and topics, that would be very interesting to a lot of people spending a ton of money with Google right now,” the person said.
A dark vision just flashed in my mind. And I am certain this is what will happen. AI-generated ads done in real time based on the latest “trending” thing. Presented to users basically as soon as the topic has the slightest amount of “trend”.
Just emitting untold amounts of CO2 to show you generated ads in near real time.
No wonder Google ex-CEO was saying fuck climate goals.
Minority report ads but somehow even more vapid
Every major ai company did this let them do that what is to loose here?
Lose*
My bad english isn’t my 1st or 2nd language
Don’t worry. It’s my first and I still get shit wrong.
People like to act as if archiving has never been a thing until about a year ago at which point it was suddenly invented and is now a threat in some nebulous way.
The difference is there is more control in what is kept in the archive.
We have little to no control over what an LLM regurgitates.
I’ve been waiting for someone to accidentally surface PIIs from an LLM.
We’ve had this thing hammering our servers. The scraper uses randomized user-agents browser/OS combinations and comes from a number of distinct IP ranges in different datacenters around the world, but all the IPs track back to Bytedance.
I can not contribute to anything here, I just came to say I really really like the phrase “gobbling something up” :D
better than “slammed”
It’s illegal when a regular person steals something, but it’s innovation and courage, when a huge corporation steals something. Interesting how that works
Honestly it’s fucking angering. So much regulation and geo-restrictions and licensing schemes… but it’s cool that there are data brokers, and shit like this. On top of it all Chrome screwing us with manifest v3 and killing ad blocking on chrome. It’s already in canary build.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS SPECIES?!
Capitalism.
What’s being stolen
Data, network bandwidth, and CPU/Processing time from essentially every website in the world, and when you’re paying for cloud power to run your website the cost of webscrapers running a train on your digital asshole adds up QUICK.
It’s why normal human being people get sued to shit for webscraping data from certain companies who care. But companies don’t get sued because go fuck yourself. Kill bytedance.
Any regular person can scrape and use public data for AI use, it’s not illegal for companies or individuals and it shouldn’t be.
proceeds to download the entirety of one piece to train an AI
This is fine. I support archiving the Internet.
It kinda drives me crazy how normalized anti-scraping rhetoric is. There is nothing wrong with (rate limited) scraping
The only bots we need to worry about are the ones that POST, not the ones that GET
I had to block ByteSpider at work because it can’t even parse HTML correctly and just hammers the same page and accounts to sometimes 80% of the traffic hitting a customer’s site and taking it down.
The big problem with AI scrapers is unlike Google and traditional search engines, they just scrape so aggressively. Even if it’s all GETs, they hit years old content that’s not cached and use up the majority of the CPU time on the web servers.
Scraping is okay, using up a whole 8 vCPU instance for days to feed AI models is not. They even actively use dozens of IPs to bypass the rate limits too, so theyre basically DDoS’ing whoever they scrape with no fucks given. I’ve been woken up by the pager way too often due to ByteSpider.
My next step is rewriting all the content with GPT-2 and serving it to bots so their models collapse.
I think a common nginx config is to just redirect malicious bots to some well-cached terrabyte file. I think hetzner hosts one iirc
https://github.com/iamtraction/ZOD
42kB ZIP file which decompresses into 4.5 PB.