AI's New Roadblock: Nepenthes Strikes Back
Nepenthes, created by developer Aaron, is a malicious AI tarpit designed to confuse bots that ignore robots.txt. Inspired by anti-spam methods, it floods AI crawlers with nonsense, raising operational costs for companies relying on bot data. Only OpenAI's systems have reportedly avoided it. Though some question its effectiveness, Nepenthes is a symbol of resistance against unregulated AI scraping, prompting the creation of other tools like Iocaine to defend online content.