I'm imagining a break future where, in order to access data from a website you have to pass a three tiered system of tests that make, 'click here to prove you aren't a robot' and 'select all of the images that have a traffic light' , seem like child's play.

How can i make something like this

Typical bluesky post

Cool, but as with most of the anti-AI tricks its completely trivial to work around. So you might stop them for a week or two, but they'll add like 3 lines of code to detect this and it'll become useless.

Such a stupid title, great software!

Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They're a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.

Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they're a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you'd have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.

So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.

--recurse-depth=3 --max-hits=256

There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers.

(Here's an advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the IPs that requested it do, in fact, belong to crawlers.)