On Wednesday, internet infrastructure supplier Cloudflare introduced a brand new characteristic known as “AI Labyrinth” that goals to fight unauthorized AI knowledge scraping by serving faux AI-generated content material to bots. The software will try and thwart AI corporations that crawl web sites with out permission to gather coaching knowledge for big language fashions that energy AI assistants like ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, based in 2009, might be finest often known as an organization that offers infrastructure and safety providers for web sites, significantly safety towards distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults and different malicious site visitors.

As an alternative of merely blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them right into a “maze” of realistic-looking however irrelevant pages, losing the crawler’s computing assets. The strategy is a notable shift from the usual block-and-defend technique utilized by most web site safety providers. Cloudflare says blocking bots typically backfires as a result of it alerts the crawler’s operators that they have been detected.

“After we detect unauthorized crawling, slightly than blocking the request, we are going to hyperlink to a sequence of AI-generated pages which might be convincing sufficient to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “However whereas actual trying, this content material isn’t truly the content material of the positioning we’re defending, so the crawler wastes time and assets.”

The corporate says the content material served to bots is intentionally irrelevant to the web site being crawled, however it’s fastidiously sourced or generated utilizing actual scientific information—akin to impartial details about biology, physics, or arithmetic—to keep away from spreading misinformation (whether or not this strategy successfully prevents misinformation, nevertheless, stays unproven). Cloudflare creates this content material utilizing its Staff AI service, a business platform that runs AI duties.

Cloudflare designed the entice pages and hyperlinks to stay invisible and inaccessible to common guests, so individuals searching the net do not run into them accidentally.

A wiser honeypot

AI Labyrinth capabilities as what Cloudflare calls a “next-generation honeypot.” Conventional honeypots are invisible hyperlinks that human guests cannot see however bots parsing HTML code would possibly comply with. However Cloudflare says trendy bots have change into adept at recognizing these easy traps, necessitating extra subtle deception. The false hyperlinks include acceptable meta directives to stop search engine indexing whereas remaining enticing to data-scraping bots.