Discussion
Loading...

Post

  • About
  • Code of conduct
  • Privacy
  • About Bonfire
Stefano Marinelli
@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe  ·  activity timestamp 8 hours ago

A short while ago I was explaining to a client the reason why his website has seen a very significant increase in load over the past few weeks. On many of the servers I manage, I see connections coming from residential users, yes, but mainly from unscrupulous AI scrapers that do not care about overloading everything. Someone on their side replied to me: "Wouldn’t moving everything to the cloud solve the problem? I mean... autoscaling!"

That sparked a somewhat "conspiratorial" thought. Some colleagues have told me that, with the recent surge in AI bot traffic, their costs have skyrocketed. Given how much money is being spent, and not earned, on AI, are we really sure this is not, in some way, planned or at least welcomed as a way to increase costs for end users of cloud services and funnel them into AI budgets?

#SysAdmin #IT

  • Copy link
  • Flag this post
  • Block
trainguyrom
@trainguyrom@techhub.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@stefano That gets me thinking, if I were AWS looking to scrape sites, pushing more sites onto AWS would make scraping them a lot cheaper and easier since that would be traffic entirely happening on my network and my hardware (plus they could theoretically simply directly ingest the web content instead of scraping it)

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Uwe Trenkner
@utrenkner@mastodon.green replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@stefano If Google et al. asked their own AI chatboxes “what could we do to make even more money?”, your guessed reason surely popped up amongst the recommended “solutions”!

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Stefano Marinelli
@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@utrenkner Yes, probably. 😆

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
subnetspider
@subnetspider@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@stefano Why does everyone in corporate default to "just throw more money at the problem"?

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Stefano Marinelli
@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@subnetspider Because they think money is both the root of and the cure for all problems.

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Tim Chase
@gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 5 hours ago

@stefano this sounds a lot like a conversation I had at $DAYJOB where management wanted reports of wins encountered when using chatbots but didn't have any way to note the losses—time sunk into fruitless things, fixing problems with LLM-generated code, getting wrong answers, accidentally leaking confidential data? Nope, not measured, only the successes. 😑

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
release_candidate
@release_candidate@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 hours ago

@stefano I don't believe that's the case, although it's not impossible.

From a budget perspective, it's still not income from AI so you can't use it to convince investors on keeping burning money on it.

I'm more afraid that this may be used as an argument to build some type of "Personal internet ID" granted by some authority, as proof you are not a bot.

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
fedops 💙💛
@fedops@fosstodon.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 hours ago

@stefano I think it's fair to say that those companies profiting from increased load don't mind it.

Sort of like the general store in a western frontier town during the gold rush, they profit the most. Regardless of success people needed to buy picks and shovels and food. They all got very rich whereas less than 1:10,000 diggers did.

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Suvham Paul
@suvp@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 8 hours ago

@stefano in my college when i was introduced to ai, i found it very interesting and cool, now i hate it in every way possible...

  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block
Log in

Bonfire community

This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes

btfree.social: About · Code of conduct · Privacy ·
Bonfire community · 1.0.0 no JS en
Automatic federation enabled
  • Explore
  • About
  • Public Groups
  • Code of Conduct
Home
Login