this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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I've been following the struggle of bearblog developer to manage the current war between bot scrapers and people who are trying to keep a safe and human oriented internet. What is lemmy doing about bot scrapers?

Some context from bearblog dev

The great scrape

https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/

LLMs feed on data. Vast quantities of text are needed to train these models, which are in turn receiving valuations in the billions. This data is scraped from the broader internet, from blogs, websites, and forums, without the author's permission and all content being opt-in by default.

Needless to say, this is unethical. But as Meta has proven, it's much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It is unlikely they will be ordered to "un-train" their next generation models due to some copyright complaints.

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots/

It's more dangerous than ever to self-host, since simple mistakes in configurations will likely be found and exploited. In the last 24 hours I've blocked close to 2 million malicious requests across several hundred blogs.

What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

LLMs can't do math well. Add in the factor of needing to understand the question first before doing the math and it might work better than you think.

[–] missingno@fedia.io 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Scrapers aren't using the LLM to scrape. They just gather data the old fashioned way, by spoofing a web browser. Then the LLM can use that data, but that step comes later.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

Also, nowadays modern LLMs will have tool APIs available to them, which will likely include a calculator app. So even if LLMs are reading a page directly they likely won't be flummoxed by math problems.

[–] ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

By making thigs worse I was referring to the fact that AI centers already require too much energy

[–] henfredemars 5 points 2 days ago

It's not a perfect solution by any means. It doesn't protect user data. It doesn't do anything to help with the energy problem. It merely makes it possible for someone to run their server without getting taken offline by automated systems.

[–] GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Anything you do to inhibit LLM scrapers is by definition going to cost more energy in the short term. The idea is to drive them away by making it too costly. And realistically, in the short term, the only thing you can do to make AI farms use less energy is to have their maintainers turn them off. I'm not aware of anything we can do to make that happen.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 1 day ago

The energy being spent on web scraping is a fraction of a percent of the energy costs to train an LLM. It's a negligible increase.

This process is happening before the LLM is involved; it's probably a standard Python based script.