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So it doesn't stop LLMs from data farming but makes it spend more energy on doing so? If that's the case it sounds like that it's making things even worse
As I understand, Anubis doesn't make the user do anything. Instead, it runs some JavaScript in the client's browser that does the calculations, and then sends the result back to the server. In order for an LLM to get through Anubis, the LLM would need to be running a real JavaScript engine (since the requested calculation is too complicated for an LLM to do natively), and that would be prohibitively expensive for bot farms at any real scale. Since all real people accessing the site will be doing so through a browser, which has JavaScript built in, and most bots will just download the website and send the source code right into the LLM without being able to execute it, real people will be able to get through Anubis while bots won't. The total amount of extra energy consumed by adding Anubis isn't actually that high since bot farms aren't doing the extra work.
Take that all with a grain of salt; that info is based on a blog post which I read like 6 months ago, and I may be remembering incorrectly.
The extra work and energy expenditure is being done by every single user using the site. The server wastes everyone else's resources to provide benefits for it.
Bots can be designed to run javascript too, so if a site's contents are worth scraping it can still be done.
Do you realize how much extra work your browser has to do every time you visit a site that makes money on ads? All the additional scripts being run in the background, it's astonishing. Trust me, the additional work that users' machines have to do for this is totally insignificant when viewed in the greater context of what we actually do with computers.
Watching a 10 minute YouTube video, that's your computer doing more work than it would loading a million text based pages running Anubis.
I have uBlock origin and Ghostery, so very little.
Given that AI trainers are training on YouTube videos too, that sounds like Anubis isn't going to impose meaningful costs on them.
Well, does it work?
You don't need to guess about it, you can simply look at traffic records and see how much it changes after installing Anubis. If it works for now, great. Like all things like this, it's a cat and mouse game.
Also, the way your computer interprets a YouTube video and the way a scraper interprets a YouTube video may well be different. But in general, for a browser, streaming and decoding video is a relatively heavy and high bandwidth operation. Video is much higher bandwidth and has much higher CPU processing requirements than audio, which likewise is heavier and higher higher bandwidth than text. As a result, video and text barely compare, they're totally different orders of magnitude in bandwidth and processing needs. So does an AI scraper have to do all that decoding? I actually have no idea, but there definitely could be shortcuts, ways to just avoid it. For instance, they may only care about the audio, or perhaps the transcripts are good enough for them.