this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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244
AI insiders seek to poison the data that feeds them (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 day ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the technology.

Their initiative, dubbed Poison Fountain, asks website operators to add links to their websites that feed AI crawlers poisoned training data. It's been up and running for about a week.

AI crawlers visit websites and scrape data that ends up being used to train AI models, a parasitic relationship that has prompted pushback from publishers. When scaped data is accurate, it helps AI models offer quality responses to questions; when it's inaccurate, it has the opposite effect.

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[–] GMac@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Your comment is more technical than I can properly follow, but this all reminds me of the tarpits I read about a year ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

Is that more usable? (Genuine curiosity from someone who would shed no tears if the plagiarism machines experienced resistance)

[–] algernon@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yup. All of the things listed there are far better than this.

(I'm also in that article, look for "iocaine", although it evolved into something a whole lot more powerful, and a lot easier to deploy since the article was written).

[–] GMac@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

Love the princess bride reference. Thank you for acting on behalf of those of us with less technical skills.