<Admin> Minor change to reduce AI bots

dsio
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You will notice fewer guests online, that's due to us being more aggressive with blocking AI scrapers which were causing us a lot of traffic and expensive with no real benefit. It should make a minor improvement to site performance, and while it may appear fewer people are online, it is the same as it was before, just with more accurate numbers.

If anyone has issues with accessing the site, let us know here or PM us and we'll check it out but from the data we can see it's about 99.7% effective in blocking the bots but not people.
 
Mspeedster
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Aquagraph Aquagraph
Thanks for your continued hard work! 馃憤
These AI scraper bots might also explain the jump in traffic on your blog site, Rob. I've noticed a few of my Instagram posts get a super high number of views, like over 300,000 views in a short time. Couldn't understand why, now I suspect it's these AI bots.
 
RockBurner
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Mspeedster Mspeedster
These AI scraper bots might also explain the jump in traffic on your blog site, Rob. I've noticed a few of my Instagram posts get a super high number of views, like over 300,000 views in a short time. Couldn't understand why, now I suspect it's these AI bots.

Yup it will be. There's been articles in the tech press about the overwhelm that ai bots are causing to various sites.
 
Aquagraph
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Yes, I'm sure it must be some kind of bot, there's no way I'm getting 12,000 hits in a day.
 
dsio
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Yes, I'm sure it must be some kind of bot, there's no way I'm getting 12,000 hits in a day.
The really frustrating thing is they do all of this scraping so they can give AI generated answers to questions and short circuit people actually coming to our sites and reading or asking a question.

Then we get a guy a couple of months ago ask why the correct bracelet he bought for his Planet ocean doesn鈥檛 fit, he has a previous generation 42mm watch and the AI told him the current bracelet will fit since his watch came on rubber strap, so he buys the new 21mm through a dealer and it doesn鈥檛 fit the 20mm lugs.

Then we鈥檝e had other people buy movement parts thinking they鈥檙e just easily serviceable by the end user or another guy use our contact form for advice because his dads old 1950s Seamaster leaked when he went swimming with it despite AI telling him Seamaster meant waterproof.

It鈥檚 just so wrong so often and making everyone dumber sadly.
 
Mspeedster
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dsio dsio
The really frustrating thing is they do all of this scraping so they can give AI generated answers to questions and short circuit people actually coming to our sites and reading or asking a question.

Then we get a guy a couple of months ago ask why the correct bracelet he bought for his Planet ocean doesn鈥檛 fit, he has a previous generation 42mm watch and the AI told him the current bracelet will fit since his watch came on rubber strap, so he buys the new 21mm through a dealer and it doesn鈥檛 fit the 20mm lugs.

Then we鈥檝e had other people buy movement parts thinking they鈥檙e just easily serviceable by the end user or another guy use our contact form for advice because his dads old 1950s Seamaster leaked when he went swimming with it despite AI telling him Seamaster meant waterproof.

It鈥檚 just so wrong so often and making everyone dumber sadly.
Agreed. Someone sent me a PM because AI told him Ayrton Senna wore a Seiko A781-4000 with BFGoodrich on it, which was based on my picture from Instagram.
senna-training-set-webp.webp

I explained that my personal watch is a Seiko A781 "BFGoodrich" edition, but Senna's was a normal black A781 without BFGoodrich. Nowhere in my posts or articles did I say Senna's had BFGoodrich on it, AI made that part up. I've since edited my Instagram post to make things very clear.
 
Jim Dollares
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dsio dsio
It鈥檚 just so wrong so often and making everyone dumber sadly.
I see this at work more and more, idiots using AI to draft documents or statements. The result is usually incorrect facts, misunderstandings and false referals. Sometimes these idiots don't even review the output so what I read will include things like [add name of your company here]....
 
Aquagraph
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Google AI told me the nearest parking to the 02 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester (just behind Old Trafford) is on Granville Rd. Unfortunately this is about 100 miles away in Leicester... but it does have a park called Victoria Park on it.
 
Aquagraph
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Not being funny but I really don't think a bot should be scraping my blog for information. My blog is about 50% 'opinion', '20% sarcasm' and the rest is probably useful...
 
RockBurner
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The main problem with the AI bots for "general" usage is that they have absolutely no understanding of what any word actually means.

They work by scraping the general internet for text, with no comprehension of what any of that text means: tokenising that text (ie obfuscating it), and storing it in massive databases that create relationships between those tokens, and the other tokens nearby in the scraped text. All with no comprehension of what the text is.

Then - when a question is asked: the "ai" searches it's data horde for the tokens that relate to the text in the question (which it has no comprehension of) and analyses all the results of that search statistically to generate a collection of text that "should" be relavant to the question. That is then passed through some form of parser that corrects grammer etc so the result "looks" like english (or whatever language the question was asked in)

Basically they're a search engine with a built in collator function that hides its sources. There's absolutely nothing "intelligent" about them.



So - a forum post that declares incorrect information and is then quoted by 15 answers all of which provide different responses is actually... statistically speaking ... more relevant as an answer to the question than the 15 answers because that incorrect text appears much more often.
 
RockBurner
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Another example:

AI bots can tell you what "rhyme" means, and provide quotes of previously (human) created rhymes that they have scraped...

But: if asked what words might rhyme with a supplied word : they will provide nonsensical gibberish, because they have no comprehension of what the word rhyme actually implies about the relationship between words that rhyme.
 
Pitfitter446
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I鈥檝e had to log on every visit recently instead of I鈥檇 being remembered, is this due to the changes?
 
Thehighwayman
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Not being funny but I really don't think a bot should be scraping my blog for information. My blog is about 50% 'opinion', '20% sarcasm' and the rest is probably useful...
Definitely scraping your blog Rob.
If you google Tag Heuer 2000 history the AI response is generated from 12 sources, one of which is your blog. The others include B&O watches, Time and Tide and the main TH website, interestingly not this forum though.

One of the many issues is you can't turn the thing off on Google. It appears at the top of search results, many people don't go beyond that. Then you have the tiny disclaimer at the end stating this information may be entirely wrong! 馃檮
 
Jim Dollares
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Pitfitter446 Pitfitter446
I鈥檝e had to log on every visit recently instead of I鈥檇 being remembered, is this due to the changes?
I always suspected Martin to be an AI bot 馃槈
 
Jim Dollares
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RockBurner RockBurner
Basically they're a search engine with a built in collator function that hides its sources. There's absolutely nothing "intelligent" about them.
This is exactly what people need to understand

I also appreciate your explanation of the problem and how it works, makes it easier to understand
 
Jemagloh
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Jim Dollares Jim Dollares
I see this at work more and more, idiots using AI to draft documents or statements. The result is usually incorrect facts, misunderstandings and false referals. Sometimes these idiots don't even review the output so what I read will include things like [add name of your company here]....
Couldn't agree more, sir.
 
dsio
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Pitfitter446 Pitfitter446
I鈥檝e had to log on every visit recently instead of I鈥檇 being remembered, is this due to the changes?
That shouldn't be related, as long as the cookie is set on login it should stay logged in for around 30 days
Edited:
 
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