FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.
This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this article open in a tab, I had to go deal with a tsunami of large language model bots. It’s really fucking depressing.
Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?
AI can be incredibly useful when deployed skillfully in creative endeavors—as an ideation partner, as a scaffolding tool, by eliminating tedious tasks, etc.—but anyone making anything truly good with it is probably somebody who could already make something good first without it.
This is a really thoughtful piece by Rich, who’s got conflicted feelings about large language models in the design process. I suspect a lot of people can relate to this.
What I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.
This sums up my experience of companies and products trying to inject AI in to the products I use to communicate with other people. It’s always just in the way, making stupid suggestions.
Three designers I know have been writing about large language models.
Please read Miriam’s latest blog post.
I’m trying to be open to changing my mind when presented with new evidence.
Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.
I listened to a day of talks on AI at UX Brighton, and I came away disappointed by what wasn’t mentioned.