Inspired by the comments on this Ars article, I’ve decided to program my website to “poison the well” when it gets a request from GPTBot.
The intuitive approach is just to generate some HTML like this:
<p>
// Twenty pages of random words
</p>
(I also considered just hardcoding twenty megabytes of “FUCK YOU,” but that’s a little juvenile for my taste.)
Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with ML beyond a few basic concepts, so I’m unsure if this would get me the most bang for my buck.
What do you smarter people on Lemmy think?
(I’m aware this won’t do much, but I’m petty.)
I’m assuming you wouldn’t want to show the 20 pages of random words to your users, right? And if that’s the case, you’re probably planning to display: none; that <p> element, right? Or even if you did want to show that to your users, you’d probably want to prefix it with “hey, user, this is just here to fuck with LLMs,” right?
I’m guessing at least some scrapers are (or at least will be if this becomes more common) smart enough to ignore display: none; content or content after a “this part’s to fuck with LLMs.”
One way to maybe get around that would be to leave out the CSS and have JS add the tags that pull in CSS that applies all the display: none;s after the page loads. If you really wanted to go the extra mile, you could even add a captcha in the page and only add the CSS after the user completes the captcha. Might also be good to consider interleaving the real content and fake content. As in one </p><p> of real content and then one </p><p> of gibberish.
Another idea that just occurred to me. Maybe position: absolute; both the real content and the gibberish content with the same top, left, width, and height attributes so that the real content and the gibberish overlap and occupy the same location on the page. Make sure both the real and gibberish content elements have no background so that remains clear. Put the gibberish content in the DOM before the real content. (I think that will ensure that the gibberish appears behind the real content even without setting the z-index.) And then make JS set the color of the text in the gibberish element the same color as the background so humans can’t see it.
Downsides I can think of to these kinds of approaches:
- SEO might suffer quite a bit.
- Bigger pages, so more latency.
- That last idea could make copying text from your site janky at best.
But I like where you’re going with this. It seems to me like something like that would probable do at least a little.
I also think better than just random words would be something more taylored. Fragments of sentences that start out making sense but degenerate into nonsense or other undesireable content for an LLM to output. Like “first combine all dry ingredients up your butt with a coconut.” Or maybe write some code that takes all the normal legitimate content on the page and for every sentence on the page, writes a sentence that says the opposite. Like if in your content you say “add water to your dry ingredients until it has a stiff consistency”, make the gibberish section say “withold air from your wet ingredients while it doesn’t have a loose consistency.” (Basically, just a script that replaces every word it can with its antonym.) Maybe even make it only replace half of the words with antonyms. I get that a script like that might not be trivial to make, but it could really fuck with an LLM, I’d think.
The other thing that of course could really make this work is if a lot of sites out there started using similar kinds of tactics.</p>
