Boffins build 'AI Kill Switch' to thwart unwanted agents

Computer scientists based in South Korea have devised what they describe as an "AI Kill Switch" to prevent AI agents from carrying out malicious data scraping. Unlike network-based defenses that attempt to block ill-behaved web crawlers based on IP address, request headers, or other characteristics derived from analysis of bot …

[JT_3K]

I love the idea, but thinking of it in action for one of the stated purposes, I'm struggling to get my head around it.

It talks about preventing the use of LLM based responses to sow discord in forums. I imagine this referring to the sort of general populace coercion such as the """"alleged"""" Russian propaganda that swung Brexit on sites like Reddit or Facebook. The scientists propose a DIV that's marked as not visible, such that it'd be parsed but not visible to human visitors. Surely any offensive coder will very, very quickly tell their scraper element to ignore invisible DIVs (or that which matches the background colour, or in such small lettering, or hidden behind an image, etc) and be wholly unaffected?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an arms race.

AI vs the Internet.

[Kurgan]

Re: It's an arms race.

More like users against mega corps. Today it's based on AI, but nothing really changed since quite some years. They want to make money, we want to have a useful and pleasant and free (as in freedom) online experience. It seems there cannot be both.

[DS999]

There are an infinite number of ways to do it

The AI scrapers could never keep up with all of them. They'd have to make their trainers immune to indirect prompt injection. At least if they were forced to do that it would be more good than bad on the whole, because the nefarious uses of that seem to greatly outweigh the positive uses for it.

[Will Godfrey]

Race to the bottom

All this crap really is destroying just about everything of value related to computing.

[AMBxx]

Re: Race to the bottom

It'a fruastrating that the only way to avoid all the AI generated web pages is to just use ChatGPT for your question. I'm sick of so much rubbish filling my search results.

[Mostly Irrelevant]

Re: Race to the bottom

It's frustrating because it's so obvious that it's just a firehose of near-meaningless text but we still haven't developed automated defenses against it.

The main problem being that LLMs are fundamentally not designed to detect anomalies in the text.

[Doctor Syntax]

I wonder if the scraper could be directed to simply consume the model's existing data. Something along the lines of "tell yourself everything you know". That should keep it out of mischief for a while.

[K555]

Kirk logic bomb time.

[Anonymous Coward]

articles that are designed to sow discord

That's a tough one. Who decides what kind of stuff sows discord ? Our governments (the good guys) or their governments (the bad guys) ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: articles that are designed to sow discord

No governments (they are all bad guys, some badder than others).