alt Hacker NewsWell, some websites claimed China is behind it, which could make sense (I would not know either way). At the same time, though, I kind of doubt your carte blanche here for all those companies. Why would you think none of them are responsible for the AI slop spam?
> Our largest offenders seems to be mostly limited to South-East Asia, so probably mostly Chinese AI projects, but that's speculation
Ok. So you also don't know. Well, I don't know either, but I don't make a speculation by claiming x, y, and z companies to be exempt. In my book they are all responsible.
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Well, those companies have bots that identify themselves, and you can see what they're doing. Google especially have decades of experience of designing scrapers and seem to be able to the job of scraping the whole internet without causing problems in that time.
So, it's still possible they are also running a bunch of poorly-coded scraper bots through residential proxies, but it seems a little non-obvious why they would be doing this.
(It is worth pointing out that most of this traffic seems to be dumb: it's stuff like getting lost in generated link forests of some web apps or repeatly re-querying the same endpoint on a super-high frequency. This isn't exactly going to give a good return on investment for AI training data, especially since AIUI the main race for LLM performance now is in good quality training data)
We see constant abuse from the Tencent ASN/associated ACE ASN, and I've memorized the china169 backbone asn as AS4837 because of thr nonstop crawlers splattered across their network ranges. It's not possible to ID the operator running the crawlers running from these networks but there's a clear signal of the origin of some of these entities.