Not with admin hat on, but I would honestly treat the AI summaries with caution. Not only are they environmentally wasteful but they trawl the internet for text on the topic, whether or not it is accurate . Case in point, it picked up April Fool’s Day joke texts recently and quoted it as fact. Similarly to your Wiki point: it’s not verifiable.
I’m not against machine learning or automation but there are plenty of pitfalls and ethical issues around it.
Feedback & Feature Requests
- Points: 2 417
Arien
Posts: 1982
Joined: Thu May 07, 2020 8:56 pm
cave anserem
- Points: 2 817
New Soul
Posts: 3091
Joined: Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:24 am
I don't use AI or chat GPT at all. 
For me it may all vanish into nothing. 
It is better to find your own information. And a better one, I have no idea how either of them to use, and will never try either.
For me it may all vanish into nothing. It is better to find your own information. And a better one, I have no idea how either of them to use, and will never try either. Just call me Aiks or Aikári. Notify is off.
Find me stuff in Gondolin.
And let us embark to Valinor!
Find me stuff in Gondolin.
And let us embark to Valinor!
- Points: 214
Chef
Posts: 680
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2020 8:08 am
@Lail About a month ago we were hit by what looked like a DDOS attack that I'm pretty sure was actually Alibaba pillaging the forum for their AI (viewtopic.php?t=1499&sid=4b8663d4be5099 ... 2e0d4ea3e7), so this is definitely something that's happening to us along with the rest of the internet.
We use Cloudflare (free version), so the options they provide are more or less what we're limited to without going to more extreme measures.
At the time of the attack, I added direct IP blocking of the IP ranges that were hitting us, but obviously that's pretty useless as a general solution. I also enabled these:
These cut down on the bot access by about 90%. Just now when grabbing the screenshot I noticed Cloudflare added a third beta feature for combating AI bots via adding a bunch of only-visible-to-bots links, to (supposedly) redirect them away from the actual user content on the site. I didn't find any documentation on it but I flipped in on so maybe that will make some difference.
With all those added, the truth is, I still see a lot more anonymous, not-blocked access to the site over the past couple months than we ever had before. The 'more extreme measures' mentioned above that we could attempt if avoiding AI consumption is a very high priority for members would be things like
I'm just figuring this out as I go and really don't know a lot about the bot world - so if anyone has suggestions outside of what I'm doing / listing here please let me know and we'll see what we can do. Aside from the personal nostalgia for jokes & folks, this site was also very much born out of resentment for the state of the modern internet and the giant money pits that increasingly mediate all access to it & interactions with it. Now those same archons have decided they own not just their giant slice of the internet but all the rest of it too, and so they are swallowing it all up. So, while I'm personally a little fatalistic about our ability to stave off our collective mill-grist-ification, anything we can do to symbolically spit in the eye of the great beast that is Big Computer, I'm up for trying.
We use Cloudflare (free version), so the options they provide are more or less what we're limited to without going to more extreme measures.
At the time of the attack, I added direct IP blocking of the IP ranges that were hitting us, but obviously that's pretty useless as a general solution. I also enabled these:
These cut down on the bot access by about 90%. Just now when grabbing the screenshot I noticed Cloudflare added a third beta feature for combating AI bots via adding a bunch of only-visible-to-bots links, to (supposedly) redirect them away from the actual user content on the site. I didn't find any documentation on it but I flipped in on so maybe that will make some difference.
With all those added, the truth is, I still see a lot more anonymous, not-blocked access to the site over the past couple months than we ever had before. The 'more extreme measures' mentioned above that we could attempt if avoiding AI consumption is a very high priority for members would be things like
- Deleting the automatic [Bot] accounts for Google, Bing etc that you'll often see in the 'Who's Online' section. These are default accounts in the phpBB software and historically are used by search engines to index web pages (which is why we finally show up in the top couple results if you search 'lotrplaza' etc). These days, I wouldn't be surprised if those bots are used to do AI scraping as well (search engines are all a big mix of both now), but I really don't know. I'm not clear on the effectiveness of deleting these bots in mitigating the AI aspect.
- Adding stricter site access settings, like captchas to view page content & rate limiting. These would limit bot content, but also potentially impacts real user experience on the site (we'll all be spending more time identifying traffic lights and motorcycles if we go that route)
- Making the site content member-only. If combined with the search-engine-bot ban above, I suspect this would pretty much insulate us entirely from the outside world. The downside of that would be... we're entirely insulated from the outside world. Not likely to attract a whole lot of new members with this approach, but again, that depends on what folks prioritize.
I'm just figuring this out as I go and really don't know a lot about the bot world - so if anyone has suggestions outside of what I'm doing / listing here please let me know and we'll see what we can do. Aside from the personal nostalgia for jokes & folks, this site was also very much born out of resentment for the state of the modern internet and the giant money pits that increasingly mediate all access to it & interactions with it. Now those same archons have decided they own not just their giant slice of the internet but all the rest of it too, and so they are swallowing it all up. So, while I'm personally a little fatalistic about our ability to stave off our collective mill-grist-ification, anything we can do to symbolically spit in the eye of the great beast that is Big Computer, I'm up for trying.
