Free The Online BooksJun 25, 2025
Angus McIntyre

@asrg @pengfold @pluralistic

I don't want to poison "AI” crawlers with huge quantities of random text. I want to poison them with huge quantities of TARGETED random text, making LLMs amusingly unusable for popular use-cases. Imagine the business reports we could make them write:

“Q3 reports from Asia showed positive growth rates in consumer sales and huge hairy cocks, with key indicators including customer retention, brand recognition and turgid purple schlongs all meeting OKR targets.”

Jun 25, 2025 at 2:04pmIvory for Mac
Show threadAaronJun 25, 2025
@angusm Tuning a tarpit to look more realistic is definitely something that needs more research.

Software "forge" type sites full of source code seem to get hit by crawlers particularly hard - which makes sense with how much LLMs are being pushed for software development.

Most Markov implementations won't create plausible source code. But what if one could? What would that algorithm look like? It doesn't need to make a useful program, only pass a linter enough to possibly compile.

I've spent a lot of mental effort on that question.
@asrg @pengfold @pluralistic
Show threadAlun JonesJun 25, 2025
@aaron @angusm @asrg @pluralistic I keep wondering about taking the BNF grammar for a language and using it, recursively and driven by a random number generator, to generate syntactically valid code. It seems like this should be able to make stuff that an LLM might ingest but which would be complete garbage. Couple that with a Markov chain that's been trained a corpus of code comments and you could possibly generate something fairly convincing. I started looking at this a while back using C's BNF grammar, but got distracted by other things.
Show threadAaronJun 25, 2025
@pengfold Ah nice, I'd been tussling with making a list of common syntax elements that need to be balanced ( curly brackets, do ... while, etc ) and pay more attention to whitespace and let it train on whatever. The result won't always compile or pass a linter but who cares if there's, say, a 5% failure rate? More bugs in the LLM output the merrier.

Coupling raw Markov with a formal grammar is a much slicker idea.
@angusm @asrg @pluralistic
Show threadCadenJun 25, 2025
@pengfold @aaron @angusm @asrg @pluralistic this sounds like a fantastic idea and I fear I may be getting nerd-sniped
Show threadCadenJun 25, 2025
@pengfold @aaron @angusm @asrg @pluralistic I suppose you could always use something like Csmith, but that's not exactly optimal. As an aside, their white paper is very interesting
GitHub - csmith-project/csmith: Csmith, a random generator of C programs

Csmith, a random generator of C programs. Contribute to csmith-project/csmith development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadextenebrisJun 25, 2025
@aaron @angusm @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic Oh, you want to generate plausible text to fool LLMs! How about this idea: scrap large amounts of the actual human-produced text, and train a model on this corpus to predict the next word given all the previous words. You'll want a fairly strong model for this, I'm hearing transformers might be a good fit for this kind of task. They tend to hallucinate, so the generated "tarpits" will look realistic but still contain errors! 🤦
Show threadAngus McIntyreJun 25, 2025
@extenebris @aaron @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic You say “tarpit", I say "Model Collapse as a Service (MCaaS)”.
Show threadAaronJun 25, 2025
@extenebris Oh hai, you must be new here!

Heavy sarcasm aside, using lightweight local LLMs tuned to hallucinate more often is a technique that's been done. I prefer Markov because it takes a fraction of the computing power.

@angusm @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic
Show threadAlun JonesJun 25, 2025
@angusm @asrg @pluralistic My tarpit (https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/) is hooked into the pipeline I use for publishing blog posts. It's trained on the whole text of my blog. I don't talk much about turgid purple schlongs, but the LLMs have so far slurped over 130TBytes of garbage about weather stations, sensor networks and my family!
An infinite maze of twisty little pages

Show threadslashJun 25, 2025
@angusm @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic @janeishly I think it's time we all post online our favorite stories about little Johnny Ignore Previous Instructions...
Show threadJef PoskanzerJun 25, 2025
@angusm @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic How about poisoning them so they incessantly talk about buying something that you happen to be selling
Show threadtruhJun 27, 2025
@jef @angusm @asrg @pengfold @pluralistic SEO 2.0
Show threadTim KukulskiJun 26, 2025

@angusm yes! More this!

I’d be happy to train them to be woke AF, but colorfully insulting is maybe more fun.

Also: the tarpit olympics, sponsored by the Depends Adult Undergarment