Coder creates an 'infinite maze' to snare AI bots in an act of 'sheer unadulterated rage at how things are going' on the content-scraped web

Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner: 2049, his face cut up and with a bandage over his nose, bathed in purple light with the blackground a blurry blue.

I'm getting a little tired of our deep-learning future, folks. While generative AI and deep learning technology isn't inherently bad—it's being used for folding proteins and advancing medical science, for example—the routine doling-out of slop has everyone paranoid, content trawlers are scraping through the web sucking up everything in sight, and an endless parade of techbros are insisting their software can think, feel, and make important decisions, despite evidence to the contrary.

An anonymous coder, writing to 404media under the fake name Aaron B, has also been feeling the malaise, and he's doing something about it. Aaron B has created a digital flytrap to keep web-crawling bots in a thus-far undetectable doom loop, scanning the same pages over and over until someone human comes over and fixes it.